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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some 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 this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.