Lisa Müller: Who is the woman at Thomas Müller’s side?

Anyone looking for scandals with Lisa Müller will look in vain. Favorite band? Linkin Park. Favorite food? Spaghetti Vongole and chocolate. Favorite animals? Horses. Lisa and her husband Thomas Müller are considered likeable and calm. They are celebrated because they don’t celebrate like other celebrities – with the exception of Oktoberfest. Precisely because they prefer sweatpants over an evening dress and going out to eat over cooking (quote Lisa: “They are lazy”).

And precisely because the Müllers – and especially Lisa – seem so down-to-earth despite all the media attention and despite millions in their bank account, their example shows what is still slumbering subliminally in society: sexism – and the prejudices associated with the role of the so-called “player’s wife”. “.

Lisa Müller’s first great love was not named Thomas. And Lisa wasn’t called Müller yet either. When Lisa Trede, who was four years old at the time, was at the zoo or at the Oktoberfest – of course a must-see event as a real Munich child – her heart beat solely for horses. In the few interviews that exist with Lisa Müller, she talks about her first experiences on the horse farm with her grandfather. First he visits the neighboring stable with her, where she is allowed to mount Hitti’s horse for the first time, later she helps out there and starts riding herself. At the age of 14, he got his first horse – also sponsored by his grandfather.

“From a young age it was always horses, horses, horses. It was always my dream to do something with horses. Of course, it wasn’t foreseeable that things would now work the way they do here,” she said in 2019. From then on, life without horses is no longer imaginable.

The second great love also follows early. In 2007, she accompanied a referee friend to a soccer game and met the young Thomas Müller. It’s love at first sight. On the first date, Lisa adds salt to the salad she made herself, and at the age of 20, the civil wedding follows in a small circle. Thomas had previously asked for her hand in marriage on the stairs of his parents’ house at Christmas.

At just 20 years old, Lisa has already found what others spend their entire lives searching for: a great love and a great passion. Things went uphill for the Müller couple in the years that followed. While Thomas was appointed to the World Cup squad for South Africa for the first time by national coach Jogi Löw in May 2010, Lisa rode her first L-level dressage in the same year. The year before she had moved to the stables of her later successful trainer Götz Brinkmann. It is your introduction to high-end riding.

And Lisa has talent: in 2015 she received the Golden Riding Badge in dressage, one of the highest awards in German equestrian sport. In 2019 she won with her horse Stand by me unexpectedly the German Masters in Stuttgart and beats all the favorites of the equestrian elite. And in the 2024 spring tournament in Stadl-Paura, Austria, she placed in the top three several times and became the most successful German rider.

Lisa wins. Because she trains hard and always has her sights set on the next step. “The glass is always half empty for me,” she said in a 2019 interview. At tournaments she appears confident and calm on the outside, but on the inside it looks completely different: “In the evening, when I see the starter list, I would always prefer to be left out.”

Even in his rare public appearances or interviews, Müller appears rather reserved. Not shy, but controlled. She is rarely seen on the red carpet, and the appearances with her husband Thomas are also selected and have become increasingly rare over the years.

Lisa Müller has a career, her own interests, is successful and ambitious in what she does. She delivers. But not the story of the perfect player’s wife.

When her husband became world champion with the DFB team at the 2014 World Cup, Lisa wasn’t there. At the same time she competes in her own dressage competitions. In Qatar in 2022, too, she will only announce her presence in the knockout round due to her own commitments. The accusation is made again and again that she is a bad player.

Player’s wife, a sexist concept from the start. Women who are expected to sit in the stands to watch, perfectly styled and expensively dressed, cheering on their men on the field, “supporting” them in their success. Players’ wives are women who are defined in their role as “woman of…”. But Lisa is not the wife of. She is the reigning Bavarian dressage champion and is ranked 82nd in the global FEI dressage ranking.

Instead of putting herself on the sidelines, she brought her husband into the riding stables. Since 2012, she and Thomas have been leasing the “Gut Wettlkam” stud farm in Otterfing, Upper Bavaria, where they train competition horses and breed dressage horses. Lisa rides, Thomas breeds.

says the dressage rider with sparkling eyes as she strokes little foal noses and accompanies her horses from birth to retirement age. At some point she gets a truck driver’s license herself so that she can drive the large horse trailer. “It’s fun: the truck drivers look over and see a girl behind the wheel. The looks, it’s funny.” She is rarely asked questions about herself.

Lisa’s evaluation from the outside is based on different criteria. Can she be seen at Oktoberfest alongside her husband? Is she in the stadium as often as other players’ wives? Is your body too thin, too toned, too skinny?

where you can see her toned body, comments like “Oh sweetie, she’s as thin as Cathy Hummels”, “Where is Thomas?” or “It no longer has anything feminine for me.”

They are reactions that say less about them than about a social attitude. Lisa is judged because she is a woman. And because she is “Thomas Müller’s wife”.

The image of Thomas and Lisa Müller as the dream couple of German football lasted until attentive followers noticed in May that Lisa had unfollowed her husband on Instagram and had deleted or archived the pictures together. Thomas has now also unfollowed his wife. Since then, rumors about a possible separation have been simmering, and the comments under Lisa’s posts on social media are exploding.

When asked about this in May, Thomas Müller said briefly to “Bunten”: “(…) everything is okay.” An explanation that is not publicly accepted. Suddenly Lisa is the “worst wife in Germany”. While Thomas’ posts are about sporting successes or defeats, Lisa is accused of: “Without Thomas you would be nothing!”

Lisa is criticized for not being enough of a player’s wife. And then again she is accused of that she is a player’s wife. Interviews with the now 35-year-old usually do not revolve around her own career, but rather that of her husband and the relationship between the two. In 2010, when Thomas was going to the World Championships and Lisa was taking part in her first demanding dressage competitions, she was interviewed by “Welt”. Content: His success and her life as a wife at Thomas’s side. One of the few questions she gets asked about her own life: “How’s the house going?”

The fact that Lisa rarely makes public appearances or gives interviews may be because she prefers to go hiking in the mountains with her dogs or jog 15 kilometers three times a week. In an interview with the equestrian magazine “Reiter Revue” she says that she has now withdrawn further due to the envy and resentment: “Sure, when things go well, it is of course because the man pays for everything, but not because “You can do it on your own. You’re just the stupid mistress who’s lazy and just gets put on a horse.”

In the discussion about unfollowing each other on Instagram, Lisa also made it clear at the request of the broadcaster RTL on October 22nd: “I am not an appendage and not a handbag of his.”

Judgments are made about Lisa Müller, even though there aren’t enough public appearances to form a well-founded opinion. The fact that the two deleted pictures and unfollowed each other’s accounts could be the sign of a separation that many are currently interpreting it as. But it could also be an urgent wish that both want to be perceived as what they are. A successful football player. And not “the wife of…” and not a “handbag” either. But Lisa Müller, one of the most successful dressage riders in Germany.