“In Germany, that outburst shaped the language, and still today it represents one thing that is missing from German football: true passion”
Gc Milano 30/03/2010 – TV broadcast Chiambretti Night / photo Giuseppe Celeste/Image in the photo: Giovanni Trapattoni
“Strunk!”. The German press today celebrates the 25th anniversary of Giovanni Trapattoni’s legendary outburst against his Bayern Munich. It was March 10, 1998: the press conference – writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung – turned into an exemplary “display of great rhetoric. The lively formulations chosen by Trapattoni have long since entered German usage: «Strunz», «weak as an empty bottle»…”.
Trapattoni took it out on his “crybaby” players, poor Scholl, Basler and Strunz. For the SZ”mixing emotion, pathos and slight linguistic confusion, Trapattoni has created something special: he has helped to shape the language. He would later modestly say that he couldn’t be proud of a tantrum in which he made a bunch of grammatical errors, but that’s beside the point.”
His peremptory “I am finished!” (he made a mistake) became so famous in Germany that it was used, for example, on Social Democratic election posters (referring to then Chancellor Helmut Kohl). “What does Strunz want?” it became the title of a television programme, and Trapattoni himself, thanks to the “empty bottle”, became the testimonial of the empty bottle change system of a German supermarket chain.
Not only that, continues the German newspaper, his speech is still used today in the German language manuals of the well-known Klett publishing house as an exceptional example of “transitional variety”.
Obviously in Germany they remember that the Trap is to “never say cat if you don’t have it in the bag”.
“In Munich, however, Giovanni Trapattoni has achieved something that Gabriele D’Annunzio (“Memento audere semper!”), Cesare (“Veni, vidi, vici”) or Orazio (“Carpe diem!”) alike represent: the creation of new ways of to say. If we neglect the aspect of the foreign language, which is not entirely impeccable, the turbulent dynamics of Trapattoni remains, which it recalls that of Roberto Benigni at the 1999 Oscars, as well as other great Italian actors such as Totò”.
La Sz also mentions “Sergio Mattarella’s beautiful phrase shortly before a television intervention in the midst of the pandemic”, with his “Eh, Giovanni, I’m not going to the barber either”.
“In any case – concludes Süddeutsche – Trapattoni’s speech is not ridiculous at all. On the contrary: also after a quarter of a century it is still alive and represents something that seems to be missing more and more in German professional football: true passion!”
