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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, 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 so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast 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 Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.