Yet it’s nearly impossible to explain what makes Müller brilliant. “I know that I make technical mistakes from time to time,” he said. “It’s one of the aspects of my game that I’ve been working on for years. I think I’ve managed to reduce the number of those technical mistakes to a minimum, but occasionally they happen. On the other hand, I do have moments of technical brilliance.”

He pondered a moment, then added: “The players who tend to make the difference are often great dribblers. Some are very fast, others have a repertoire of moves and feints. These players need to have great technique in order to be good dribblers. But I’m not a good dribbler. One-on-one situations are not my strong suit. Consequently, people think I’m not a good technician when in fact my technique is better than I’m often given credit for.”
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Amazingly, it was Müller himself who came up with a marvellous turn of phrase to describe what makes him special. “Ich bin ein Raumdeuter,” he told a newspaper a few years ago – “I’m an interpreter of space”. When I congratulated him on this inventive coinage, he chuckled. “It’s a nice term, you’re right,” he said. “I’m not sure if I’ve done myself a favour with it, though. Every good, successful player, especially an attacking player, has a well-developed sense of space and time. It’s not a phenomenon you only find in two or three people on earth. Every great striker knows it’s all about the timing between the person who plays the pass and the person making a run into the right zone. It’s nothing new.”

This is another parallel between the two Müllers. Since there seemed no logical explanation for Gerd’s tendency to be suddenly unmarked, even though every defence in the world knew he was the most dangerous man on the pitch, many people presumed he played instinctively. Germans call this having a Torriecher – a nose for the goal, like an animal picking up a scent. Gerd slightly resented this explanation because it ignored not only the countless hours of work he put in (he even loved to go between the sticks during training to better understand how a goalkeeper thinks) but also the rest of the team. It’s the same with Thomas.

“No matter in which walk of life, man always needs an explanation,” Müller said. “He wants to understand things. Often he comes up with a very simple explanation and says it’s all because of a certain talent or maybe even chance. But sometimes what happens is the product of an elaborate move involving many players. When you make a run, you don’t always do it for yourself. Often you do it to open the door for a team-mate. If you look at basketball, this is a key element: three players create the space for one to shoot. In football, this is often underrated.”

Müller illustrated this with his opening goal in Germany’s fabled 7-1 rout of Brazil at the 2014 World Cup. We first discussed this goal last November; now he returned to the question I had back then: how could a lethal forward like him be this unmarked a few yards in front of goal following a corner? “I’m sure people watching at home threw their hands up and cried, How can the Brazilians not mark him?” Müller said. “Of course, at the end I was unmarked. But if you watch replays, you’ll see that Miro Klose and I were initially both closely marked. But then we made runs in opposite directions. We were basically exchanging positions. Our markers followed us and one of them got stuck in the goalmouth traffic. This happens.”
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