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Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.