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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load 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 likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, 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 environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.