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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will 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 far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition 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. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf 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 widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer 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 disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps 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 reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.