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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester 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 load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

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 whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is losing something here.