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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, 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 scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics 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 shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. 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 an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why 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 largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.