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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He 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 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.