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Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started 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 do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.