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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar 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 resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating 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 infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? 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 players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.