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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating 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 worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach 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 watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.