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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period 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 reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports 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 at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something in this process.