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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he 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 him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation 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, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.