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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, 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 closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, 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. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.