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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you note that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch 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 a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club 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 observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative 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 immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.