Who is newest Whitecaps star Thomas Müller?

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The list of true international star players who have chosen to play for the Vancouver Whitecaps, no matter the league they’ve been in, over the 51 years of professional soccer in this town is not very long.

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There’s Alan Ball, the former England World Cup player who helped lead the NASL Whitecaps to the Soccer Bowl in 1979.

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There’s a second tier of players who have come to Vancouver over the past decade of MLS play — Y.P. Lee, Kenny Miller, Pedro Morales, Fredy Montero, Ryan Gauld — but only Ball really matches the stature of Thomas Müller, who has a been a true international star.

He played a decade and a half for Bayern Munich. He was a key player for the German national team.

He’s not Messi or Ronaldo, but he is still a player that anyone who pays attention to the beautiful game knows.

His signing with the Whitecaps is a massive deal. He will bring professionalism of a kind not seen here before, leadership and top offensive quality. This is a move to try to win the MLS Cup this year.

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Here’s what to know about him as he and the team dot the final umlauts on his contract.

He invented a position

From just about his debut with Bayern in August 2008, a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday, it was clear he was a unique talent.

He would often line up as a striker or an attacking midfielder, but the way he played shirked convention.

Soccer players are just as often described by the role they play as where they lineup on the team sheet. In Müller’s case, he invented a new role — the Raumdeuter, or “space interpreter”.

Famed coach Pep Guardiola is a great example of what made Müller so great. Between 2013 to 2016, Guardiola was very focused on his team making the defence move through the movement of Bayern players off the ball, seeking to pass the ball as little as necessary.

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Müller scored 79 goals over Guardiola’s three seasons in charge of Bayern.

“He’s a clever, unpredictable player who always knows where he has to go,” Guardiola said of Müller in 2024.

Müller is not the fastest straight-line runner. He’s not a fabulous dribbler. He’s not a powerful striker of the ball. He’s just quite possibly the sharpest player of his generation. His strength is his ability to read the play and anticipate gaps. His runs would drag defenders out of position, opening up gaps for his teammates to run into.

That disruption inevitably leads to benefits for him — he hasn’t scored 250 goals over his Bayern career by accident.

The evolution of his game

Müller has lined up in a few spots in his career — as an out-and-out striker, on one of the wings, or sitting as the No. 10, the creative play maker behind the striker.

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That’s a role that Ryan Gauld has filled with stellar aplomb for the Whitecaps. So how Whitecaps coach Jesper Sorensen will line up his two magicians once Gauld returns to full health will be interesting.

Whatever the result, Müller has evolved his game over the years. That is partly an inevitability for a player as he ages, but it’s also about shifting his game as the squad — and coaching staff — has evolved around him.

Müller explained his own evolution to ESPN in 2021: “My best position was starting in the middle … during the game, my position changes a lot. I try to get in a nice position to receive the ball, to create space for my teammates who are receiving the ball. In former times, I had a good relationship with someone like Arjen Robben, so when he received the ball, I did my movements to make space for him and sometimes he’d put the ball into the space where I’m running. Then the game changed a little bit — my teammates changed a little bit.”

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There is every reason to think they will be a great partnership. Gauld is a player who wants the ball at his feet, who looks to put perfect passes to his teammates. Müller is a dynamic mover off the ball, less a ball-at-his-feet distributor.

Big game player

Müller’s 57 goals makes him the fifth-highest scoring player in Champions League history.

He’s not a volume scorer like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, who both scored in about three-quarters of their career Champions League games. Indeed, Müller’s strike rate, roughly one goal every three games, is far and away the lowest rate of the top 10 scorers in CL history.

But it’s still a statement about consistency.

He won the Golden Boot at the 2010 World Cup, scoring five times for Germany and adding three assists. That’s a big-game player.

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The creative touch

He’s not an on-the-ball guy, but he’s still a player who racks up the assists.

In his prime, he was a threat to score and a threat to create.

According to data tracking company OptaStats, since his debut in 2008-09, no player in Europe’s top five leagues — Germany, England, Spain, Italy and France — has more assists than Müller.

His 756 appearances in all competitions for Bayern is a club record.

“You can’t praise him enough with just words,” Bayern sporting director Max Eberl said earlier this year. “He’s had a very unique career.”

Eberl took over Bayern last year and admitted the decision he took in March to not offer Muller a new deal was so tough, he didn’t sleep for three nights. But the time had come to move on from the veteran and hand his playing time to younger players.

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Radio Müller

Müller is known for handing out nicknames. Not only did he come up with the name for the role he plays, he has named Bayern teammate — and former Whitecap, of course — Alphonso Davies, “Roadrunner.” He nicknamed former Bayern teammate Robert Lewandowski, “Lewangoalski.”

Former Bayern assistant coach Hermann Gerland gave Müller a nickname of his own: “Radio Müller.”

That’s because the attacker is known for a motor mouth, constantly talking to his teammates on the pitch, as well as haggling with the opposition and putting a word in with the officials as well.

“I’m someone who is more confident in addressing others. I try not to come across as lecturing, but to pass on pertinent information. In general, I try to implement that on the pitch,” he explained to ESPN in 2021. “There is also positive feedback. I’ve heard that I infect games with it. I also demand that I get commands from other players.”

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“Thomas Müller is like a third assistant coach,” Kai Havertz, another Germany teammate of Müller’s, said in 2021. “He helps out a lot of players and his communication on the pitch is really important. Playing with him is a lot of fun.”

For his part, after Muller’s final game for Bayern at Allianz Arena this past spring, he told a joke.

“Humour is very individual,” he announced in German. He said he had been looking for a joke about goodbyes, but couldn’t find any that suited him. So instead he looked up spicy jokes about funerals.

“Father is dying at home,” he began. “His three children are standing at his bedside. Suddenly, the smell of his favourite cake wafts from the kitchen, where the mother is baking it.

“Then he says, ‘Son, bring me a piece of my favourite cake. That would be my last wish.’

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“The son comes back from the kitchen without the cake. The father asks, ‘What’s going on?’

“And the son replies, ‘Well, mom says it’s for after the funeral.’”

The contract

Müller is not going to be a designated player this season because of how the Whitecaps chose to structure their salary cap. But next year he will be, meaning his salary can go far beyond the limits normally dictated by the league’s salary cap.

For the remainder of the year, it’s understood, he will be paid $687,000 US. Next year, he will make, it’s believed, $6.8 million US.

Both figures are big drops from what he made in his final season with Bayern, which is believed to have paid him more than $19 million US. He signed a short-term deal to play at the recent Club World Cup that paid him a couple of million dollars more.

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The debut?

Müller is expected to be officially confirmed as a Whitecap in the coming days, once all the final details, like his image rights, are sorted out in negotiations between his representatives and MLS, who technically hold all the contracts of players.

Bayern lost in the quarterfinals of the Club World Cup, so he has been out of action since July 5.

He would need a couple weeks to get back up to speed, but it sounds very possible — assuming there are no hiccups to getting the final contract signed — that he could be ready to make his debut for the Whitecaps’ next home game on Aug. 17.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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