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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part 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 about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier 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. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.