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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course 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 many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. 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 requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.