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Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar 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 major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at 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 had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", 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 year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, 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 most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker 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 influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.