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Imagine this: 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. Do not bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long 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. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why 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 ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.