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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started four times 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 analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time 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 going to get.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

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 center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.