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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. 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 handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the international break, 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 football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe 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 reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.