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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive 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 had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness 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 exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.