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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, 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 right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square 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 started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "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 deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why 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 short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

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 being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals 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 a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.