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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.