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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko 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 leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.