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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space 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 stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.