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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, 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 staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately 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 Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom 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 handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained 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 Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.