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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. 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 summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.