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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, 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. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

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, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total 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 thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko 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

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part 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 gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in such behavior. 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 explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.