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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And 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 duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all 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 abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why 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 gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. 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 inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.