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Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.