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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

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 Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes 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 influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.