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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom 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 about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.