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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, 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. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.