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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising 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 worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.