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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund 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. Do not bother locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall 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. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation 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 waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background 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, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.