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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, 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 explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

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 big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: 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 went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something in this process.