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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

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 signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.