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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run 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 cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has started 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 evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), 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 big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot 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 necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach 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 repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.