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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's 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 a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf 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 national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player 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 such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.