Summer holidays feel disorienting for those whose lives revolve around football, especially when the season's long, intense fixture period looms. Re-engagement with the sport can resemble stepping into an alternate, fully realised sub-reality populated by surreal metaphors and exaggerated crises. The Alexander Isak transfer saga dominates coverage with vast, repetitive attention while feeling oddly hollow and unresolving. Media saturation reduces the story to churned, sensational fragments, producing weariness and a sense of a 24-hour news cycle endlessly teasing and repackaging the same emptiness. The result is exhaustion, bafflement, and a sense that spectacle has outpaced substantive meaning.
Going on a summer holiday is always a bit strange when your life involves staring at sport. Taking a break just as football is preparing to enter its own sweaty, steamy eight-month meat pocket is extra tough. Re-engagement can be difficult. Oh look. There's football hiding behind a bush in the car park again, frazzled and wired from staying up drinking crystal meth negronis and writing a presentation about merging marketing and sales.
The Isak affair has been remarkable above all for its scale. It is undeniably massive. No. Don't even look at the Isak affair. Or at least, don't look too hard, because you might find that while undeniably vast and beautiful, it is also strangely hollow. So hollow that you'll keep thinking you've missed the key detail that will make it all make sense, hunched over a screen at 2.37am as a droning robot YouTube voice says things like the most sensational transfer saga in history,
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