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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics 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. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, 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, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. 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 roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.