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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes 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"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.