It’s 17 years since Thomas Müller made his debut for Bayern. Since then he has played 751 games for the club, scoring 248 goals, while also scoring 45 goals in 131 games for Germany. He has won 13 Bundesliga titles, two Champions Leagues and a World Cup. He will retire at the end of the Club World Cup after a career played entirely at the highest level and yet still nobody has been able to quite work out what he is.
Is he a centre-forward? Is he a false 9? Is he a wide forward, a second striker, an attacking midfielder? Is he all of those things, none of those things or some of those things some of the time? Louis van Gaal loved him; Pep Guardiola never seemed quite so sure.
Müller is not especially quick, not especially dominant in the air and does not beat players with close technical skill, but he is obviously a player of the highest level. Then there’s his puzzling goals record: how did a player who averaged roughly a goal every three games managed not only to win the Golden Boot at the 2010 World Cup but also the Silver Boot at the following tournament? (Even odder is that the five goals he scored in South Africa were his only international goals that year.) The best explanation of Müller perhaps came from his own mouth. “I am a Raumdeuter,” he said in 2011 – an interpreter of space.
He has that capacity a great goalscorer, a Gerd Müller or a Gary Lineker, has to anticipate where the ball will drop, but he is not a poacher. He has the ability of a Luka Modric or a Xavi to find space in a hectic midfield, but he is not a playmaker. Raumdeuter has become such an accepted phrase that it is a role that can be assigned to forwards on the video game Football Manager. It is not entirely clear whether Müller was making a joke when he said it.
Müller’s football may be hard to identify, but it is nothing to his sense of humour. When he claimed that Robert Lewandowski’s nickname was “Robert Lewangoalski”, before pausing, nodding and opening his eyes wider as though imploring people to laugh, it initially seemed he was making an inexplicably bad joke. Then the thought occurred that he perhaps knew that and the joke was actually how inane is a lot of football’s banter culture.
At that moment, the entire notion of the press conference seemed in danger of imploding under the weight of its own futility. This was Eric Morecambe, it was Larry David, it was Stewart Lee, a ludic recklessness with form that not only managed to be funny by not being funny, but interrogated the entire notion of funny.
It is the same with his coinage of Raumdeuter, which is itself a pun, albeit a rather better one that Goalandowski. Traumdeuter is German for an interpreter of dreams, a term popularised by Sigmund Freud. Traum is derived from the Old Icelandic draumr via the Middle High German troum and initially meant phantom or illusion. The English “dream”, which emerged in the 12th century, shares the same root.
Deuter comes originally from proto-Indo-European tē̌u-, which meant something like “swell”; it’s also the root of words such as thumb, thigh and thousand. More appositely, it is the origin of þeuðō, an early Germanic term meaning a lot of people, that came to be used to mean tribe. A couple of thousand years ago, if you spoke the demotic language as opposed to Latin, you were in effect said to be speaking þiudiskaz – that is, þeuðō-ish – which over time evolved to become Deutsch.
Deuten became a verb meaning to make clear for the mass of the people. That sense remains in deutlich – clearly, significantly – or eindeutig – clearly, obviously; and, to a lesser extent in bedeuten – to mean. Deuten itself is slightly more sophisticated than ziegen – to show – but not as scientific as interpretieren or analysieren: to interpret, not in the sense of translating, but of explaining.
With that context, Müller’s apparently unremarkable statement that he is a Raumdeuter can be seen not only as a description of what he is, but of what he is not. He is not a player who deals in phantoms, illusions and dreams; he is a pragmatist. He sees space – better than almost anybody else of his generation – and through his movement, his assists and his goals he explains it to the mass of the people: those watching it in the stands or on television who do not have his extraordinary grasp of the shape and dynamics of the game.
after newsletter promotion
Perhaps there is even a sense in that second syllable that the role of the Raumdeuter is characteristically German, that it stems from the peculiarly German way of seeing the game that meant that between 1970 and 2000, there was an acceptance that football was about the inter-movement of players, unencumbered by the impetus to press that dominated in the rest of northern Europe.
It is probably no coincidence that the modern notion of the libero was created by Franz Beckenbauer, whose game, no less than Müller’s, relied on the interpretation of space, just at the other end of the field. Müller, in his own way, was just as central to Germany’s fourth World Cup success as Beckenbauer was to its second.
In those Jogi Löw sides of 2010 and 2014, he was the attacking brain of the side, the player who ensured the counterattacks were devastating. After finding space in a crowd box to head the first goal in the semi-final in 2014, it was Müller, revelling in the chaos of the Brazilian meltdown, who orchestrated the 7-1.
Müller retires as the joint-most successful German player in terms of trophies won, although he would edge ahead of Toni Kroos were Bayern to lift the Club World Cup. But more than that, Müller defined not only a position but an entire, and idiosyncratically German, way of thinking about the game. He is the embodiment of the process that brought the World Cup.
