As part of our buildup to the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, we are publishing excerpted chapters from The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s definitive book on the 100 greatest players of all time, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.The 10 players we are featuring are the highest-ranked World Cup winners of our 100. Today, it’s the prolific striker, ranked 13th in our original list, who scored for West Germany in the 1974 final.There is one thing every footballer in this book has in common.It’s a bit technical, so apologies for blinding you with jargon here, and please don’t feel too bad if you don’t completely follow, but here it is: They’re all really good at football.Well, that’s sort of true. It depends on what you mean by “really good at football.” One of them did not boast the same skill or grace or innovation or mystery or fantasy as the others. He wasn’t so much really good at football, but really good at scoring goals. Are those two things different? Maybe not. But Gerd Müller made up for not being stellar at the other stuff, the things we often talk about when we talk about the “greats”, by being maybe the best there ever was at the game’s most fundamental task.Here are a few statistics.He scored 365 goals in 427 Bundesliga games.He scored 40 in one season, a record that stood for five decades.He scored 85 for club and country in one calendar year.He scored 68 in 77 European matches.He scored an astonishing 68 in 62 international appearances for West Germany and would have managed many more had he not retired from the national team in 1974, aged 28, after the German federation banned the players’ wives from attending the post-World Cup victory celebration banquet.Among those international goals, he scored 14 over 13 games at two World Cups, a record that stood for 32 years until it was broken by Brazil’s Ronaldo in 2006.Gerd Müller (right) guides a header beyond Australia goalkeeper Jack Reilly and defender Doug Utjesenovic at the 1974 World Cup (Staff/AFP via Getty Images)He scored 566 goals in 607 games for Bayern Munich, the club for whom he made his debut in 1964 when they were still playing in the German second tier and, along with Franz Beckenbauer, played as much of a role as anyone in making them the behemoth they are today.He made it into double figures for league goals in each of his 14 full seasons with Bayern.He can be forgiven for the only time he managed fewer than 10 league goals in a campaign with the club — Müller scored nine in 19 games in the first half of the 1978–79 campaign before moving to Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the United States.Goals were his obsession, and it was the what rather than the how that consumed him. The method of the conversion did not matter, but the result did.Müller would score by whatever means necessary: tap-ins, scuffed shots, headers from three yards out, in off the thigh, the shins, the torso, scooped in from the floor, left foot, right foot, head — whatever body part could propel a football over that line.If you watch clips of Müller’s goals, one of the things you’ll notice is how often he just seems to… emerge. And then score. The ball will disappear into a melee of defenders, only for Müller to suddenly appear, completely free, like a cartoon character calmly stepping out of a cloud of flailing arms and legs. He appeared to have an ability to be in the right position to score, and often you weren’t entirely sure how he arrived there.It’s pretty hard to explain how he did it. Some attribute it to his short, stocky frame, thus allowing him to have a low centre of gravity to wriggle away from hulking defenders, but also with the strength to muscle his way into advantageous positions. He had thighs like beer barrels and calves like hams, giving him the sort of power you might not expect from a relatively diminutive man.Gerd Müller (left) scoring for his country against Poland at the 1974 World Cup (AFP via Getty Images)The most appealing, perhaps romantic, explanation for why he was so good is that it was something intangible. He could, in the traditions of the great goal poachers, smell opportunities. It all just happened. He just… knew. “You can’t learn that,” he said in a documentary produced by the Bundesliga. “You just have to have the instinct to score goals.”