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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while 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 top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap 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 international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool 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 filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.