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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports 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 most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player 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 by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing something in this process.