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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps 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 whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.