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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, 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 in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked 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. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.