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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. 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 a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is losing something in this process.