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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports 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 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 time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing something here.