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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period 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. Jack Grealish 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.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.