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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, 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 reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times 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 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 podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load 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 likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier 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. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

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 view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.