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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, 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 shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long 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 major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving 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 largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.