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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run 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 turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics 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. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer 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 imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth 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 wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.