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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone 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 least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack 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 largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.