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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that Sesko 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. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something in this process.