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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate 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 year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why 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 gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.