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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "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 deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part 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 largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll 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 fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped 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, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.