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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring 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, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned 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 their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.