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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? 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 thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester 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 load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.