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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are 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 temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak 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 inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.