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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn 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. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time 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 poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.