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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And 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 thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" 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 needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points 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. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.