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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.