THOMAS MÜLLER (2010, 2014)

Everything changed in 2009, when Louis van Gaal took over at Bayern Munich and brought possession football to the Bundesliga. The Bavarians reached their first Champions League final since 2001. Ballack got injured, missed the World Cup, and never turned out for Germany again. The Nationalmannschaft played a new kind of game, with a new playmaker, a skinny kid called Mesut Özil.

And an even skinnier kid came out of nowhere—the third German division, to be precise—to catch half of Europe and Germany’s opponents in South Africa on the blind side. Twelve months after Thomas Müller had been an unused sub in a 1-1 match between the Bayern Munich B team and Kickers Offenbach, he picked up the Golden Boot and the Best Young Player award for his five goals at the World Cup.

There are more elegant players in Joachim Löw’s squad (Özil), faster ones (Mario Götze), more thrilling ones (Marco Reus), but Müller is special, incomparable. He doesn’t look like a footballer to begin with. The roving forward often seems to scuffle over the pitch with one sock half rolled down and a white undershirt limply hanging out the back of his shorts. And his body looks ill-suited to the job. “I’ve tried, but muscles don’t grow,” he’s said about his spindly legs. The son of a BMW engineer, he has made the most of his physical attributes and relative lack of power. “There are others who are better in the air, better with their right and with their left,” he told Süddeutsche Zeitung. “My legs were never a problem. They’ve helped me, even playing the youth team. If you can’t just count on your physical attributes, you have to switch on your brain and make certain runs to evade direct tackles.”

Müller has memorably described himself as a “Raumdeuter,” an interpreter of space. It’s an apt label for a player who eludes categories as easily as slow-thinking opposition defenders. Müller sounds out areas that few care to explore, for example the gap between the back four and the goal line when there’s a throw-in. To everybody else, it’s a barren land, not worth furrowing. Most of his teammates at the club and international levels are better with the ball—some are better without it too. Müller finds room for his legs when there isn’t any and ways toward the goal that are hidden to everyone else.

Germany have always had small, technical players. In fact, they’ve always had many more than the “Panzer” stereotype alleged. But Müller wouldn’t have thrived in previous Nationalmannschaft editions. Discovering space in unchartered territory—his expertise, his raison d’être—simply wasn’t much of a concern before 2010.

In the dark age of the noughts decade, Germany didn’t worry about finding space for their game against big-name opposition, their main aim was to deny space to the other side. Without the ball, they often had 50 meters of green ahead of them. Only when they started monopolizing possession did getting behind deeper defenses become a problem that cried out for a specialist. (Müller, in fairness, is not bad in counterattacks either).

Löw’s Germany tend to have the ball and plenty of chances. Lack of leadership is still an easy hook to hang defeats on (see the 2-1 loss to Italy in Euro 2012), but the new buzzword has become “efficiency.” It’s what Germany used to excel at—in the view of others—and what they fear is slightly missing in this ensemble of highly gifted technicians. “All the possession counts for little if you don’t have efficiency up front,” warned Germany’s sporting director Oliver Bierhoff a month before the tournament.

This is where Müller should come in. His former youth coach Hermann Gerland once said that he could “play badly for 90 minutes but still score a goal.” He’s not just a tourist who enjoys jaunty trips to foreign spheres; he arrives like a thief in the night, bent on plundering (a goal or two). In Brazil, much will depend on him. Thomas Müller could well decide what the definitive chapter on Löw’s team will read like a generation or two from now.

Michael Bradley’s success is built on the mastery of his emotions

by Bobby Warshaw

Getty Images

June 12, 2015 2:17 PM

How often do you make the decision you actually want to make? How many times do you just do what you think should actually be done to be the person you want to be, rather than letting fear or pride or ambition cloud your judgment? It’s not easy, is it?

Michael Bradley is clearly the best player on the U.S. men’s national team. He just beasted two of the best teams in the world. He’s a clean passer, hard working and intelligent. I think, though, his most defining attribute, the one that helps him the most, is one that you can’t measure: his emotional stability on the field.

There’s a lot of ways to mess up in soccer. But too often we do it because of our own emotions and motivations.

When I watch guys play, including myself and my teammates, I can usually apply an emotion to every action. When a center back plays a long ball to the empty channel, he lost his nerve; when a center mid plays a diagonal pass across the field, he got flustered; when a player forces a difficult ball forward, he got anxious. My personal pet peeve is when a guy tries a complicated play to look good, rather than playing the simple pass.

Players have a lot of thoughts racing through their minds. We want to make a great play to stick out. We want to avoid a bad play to keep our place in the team. We want to make a great play to make up for a bad play. We want to avoid a terrible play to keep from the public embarrassment. We want to shine to get recognized by others.

You can’t blame the players. We train so hard to be intelligent, and then the game happens. It’s flying a million miles an hour and the fans are screaming and teammates are yelling and coaches are making hand gestures. When your heart rate’s up and your blood’s flowing and your mind’s racing, logic isn’t ruling. And so a lot of intelligent players that lose the plot.

It’s often not necessarily even the wrong play that gets made, but it’s not usually the best one. The spurt of emotion pushes them towards an action. It blinds them to the logical decision.

But when I watch Michael Bradley, I can never sense a raw emotion. Yes, sometimes raw emotion is good. It can certainly create moments of magic. But more often than not it clouds your judgement, especially in a center mid that controls the game. Michael is always stable, logical.

Some people call it his soccer brain. It’s true, Bradley has a wonderful soccer brain. He’s a soccer junky. But like anything, there’s two parts: theory and practice. There’s a lot of people that can outline the X’s and O’s and proper shifts and movements and use all the jargon. The difficult part is executing the thoughts when there’s a storm around you.

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Michael doesn’t seem to let those emotions overcome him. He always does what his logical mind would want him to do. He never lets emotion push him in the wrong direction. When he goes for a chipped pass, I don’t sense it stems from vanity. When he plays a long ball, I don’t get the feeling it’s selfish. When he needs to make short passes in tough situations, he doesn’t let fear stop him. He can let his intelligence take control.

He plays the game in the right frame of mind. And as a result, he analyzes the game the way it should be seen. He doesn’t get in his own way.

Soccer is a tough game in itself, but the mind can often over-complicate things. Players are human, and players get nervous and scared and ambitious like everyone else. The emotions set our mind running in different directions and our body follows suit.

There’s a lot of players that can pass and run. It takes something else to be special. What sets Michael apart is that he doesn’t let the extraneous emotions affect him. Selfishness and fear don’t creep in.

I can’t imagine a life where I have control over my emotions. But I bet it’d be pretty nice.