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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. 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 watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool 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 submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. 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 view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.