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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate 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 podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

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 judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.