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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.