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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you run online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies 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 read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis 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, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), 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 striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.