Aww, Perisic!

Origin

‘Ao, Perišić!’ is a phrase that mocks the habit of taking your frustration out on someone who did nothing wrong. Ivan Perišić is a Croatian international winger who helped his country to the 2018 World Cup final and third place in 2022; in the 2022–23 season he played alongside Son Heung-min at Tottenham Hotspur.

It started with the fandom. As Son’s form dipped, some supporters began blaming Perišić even for passages that were plainly not his doing, and users of the overseas-football gallery on DCInside began sarcastically writing ‘Ao, Perišić’ under any situation at all. The phrase is therefore not an attack on Perišić but an impression of the people attacking him.

What poured fuel on it was a moment against Arsenal in which Perišić visibly expressed frustration with Son. Videos circulated with deliberately inflammatory titles about the incident, and the format acquired a cult following, with the mock death-sentence phrasing becoming part of the meme itself.

Spread

From the overseas-football gallery it moved to football communities such as Soccerline, then into baseball communities. Once it had stopped being sport-specific it turned into a suffix game, with any name at all slotted into the pattern.

The postscript became part of the meme too. In February 2025, when Perišić set the record as the oldest scorer in the UEFA Champions League at 36, Korean sports outlets reported it while invoking the meme by name and calling him the man the whole country used to blame.

Usage

• Blaming an entirely unrelated name for something that is obviously your own fault
• Mocking someone who deflects blame by imitating them
• The variant that slots any name into the same pattern

The essential condition is a shared understanding that nobody means it. The moment someone genuinely believes the blame belongs there it stops being a meme and becomes real criticism, so it reads badly to anyone who does not know the context.

Sources

• Namuwiki, ‘Ao Perišić’ — the origin in sarcasm aimed at blame-shifting fans on the overseas-football gallery; the Arsenal incident and the inflammatory video titles; the spread into football and baseball communities; the suffix pattern
• Namuwiki, ‘Ivan Perišić’ — his Croatia career (2018 World Cup runners-up, 2022 third place) and his Tottenham spell
• Star News, February 21st, 2025 — press coverage that invokes the meme directly, and its postscript