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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.