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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.