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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose 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 an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved 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 "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he 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 perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.