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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.