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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. 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 summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load 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.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating 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? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.