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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus 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 "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" 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 time and air 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 chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

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 inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.