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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.