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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, 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 browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.