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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while 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 Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's 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 (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media 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: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all losing something here.