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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.