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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams 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. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint 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 had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star 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 itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.