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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing 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. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.