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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite 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 planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context 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 time at United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals 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 him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something in this process.