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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration 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 a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces 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 a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps 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 whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing something in this process.