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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although 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 best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage 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 "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.