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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester 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 gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.