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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack 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 ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already 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 another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.