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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? 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 thrillingly on a popular show over whether he 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 his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

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 watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.