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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run social media 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 online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", 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 (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down 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.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – 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 this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation 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 basically material, commodity, 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 generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.