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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester 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 load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.