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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko 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 big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why 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 widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, 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 same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.