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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time 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 planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on 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. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (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 his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given 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 at the moment: 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 pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.