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.