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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight 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 far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, 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 talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.