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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose 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 deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, 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 Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: 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 pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: 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. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.