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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square 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 wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), 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 sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, 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, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.