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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times 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 analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to attack 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 about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, 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 major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he 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 situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. 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 begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.