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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.