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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly 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 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something in this process.