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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. 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". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

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, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, 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 environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.