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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, 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 mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest 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 viral chart handily informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.