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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the freedom 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 "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, 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 explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something in this process.