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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long 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 reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone 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 basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.