Chiellini Pulling Saka

About

Chiellini Pulling Saka refers to the foul action committed by Italian professional footballer and captain of Italy's national team Giorgio Chiellini as he's pulling England's Bukayo Saka's shirt in the final match of the UEFA Euro Championship 2020. The action quickly inspired a series of photoshop edits and exploitables, particularly about Italy's victory over the English team.

Origin

On July 11th, 2021, the final match for the European Championship Cup, also known as UEFA EURO 2020, was being played. The two countries involved were Italy and England, and on the 95th minute of the match, Italian player Giorgio Chiellini grabbed English player Bukayo Saka by the neck of his shirt, which caused him to stop his sprint towards the ball and fall on his back. The foul gave Chiellini a yellow card, which meant that if he were to do another similar action, he would be ejected from the game. Footage of this act in action was put on YouTube by the channel PannaFootball,^[1] which received 43,000 views in one day (shown below).

Spread

On the night of the match and the following day, screenshots and photos of the foul were shared online by the spectators of the match, spawning several edits, captions and memes on Twitter. The Twitter^[2] account @ItsKacksonKE posted the image while adding the text in his tweet, earning 56 likes for his take on the situation (shown below).

Also on June 11th, Twitter^[3] user @uwaisb_ tweeted a picture from the Justice League: Doom movie that has Darkseid holding Superman's cape in a similar fashion to how Chiellini was holding Saka, which received 260 likes in one day (shown below).

On the 4chan boards /sp/ and /pol/ several Buck Breaking edits appeared^[4][5] featuring Chiellini and others on the Italian team getting physical while defending the goal from England's black players (examples shown, below).

YouTube channel De Facto^[6] uploaded a series of captions and memes about the iconic moment, titled "Giorgio Chiellini Pulling Saka || Euro 2020 Memes," which received over 66,000 views and 510 likes in 17 hours (shown below).

On July 18th, 2021, YouTuber MR. HEY uploaded a video titled "Chiellini saves Saka", showing various clip and greenscreen edits where Chiellini pulls Saka away from dangerous situations (shown, below). The video received over 640,000 views and 34,000 likes in 4 weeks.

On August 8th, 2021, MR. HEY uploaded another Chiellini parody video, this time with Chiellini running in the middle of the 4×100 metre relay at the 2020 Summer Tokyo Olympics and pulling British runner Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake, allowing Italian runner Filippo Tortu to win. Titled "Chiellini fa vincere l' Italia ai giochi olimpici" (Chiellini makes Italy win at the olympic games), the video recieved over 551,000 views and 14,000 likes in 1 week.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References