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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage 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 summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a viral 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 by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.