Married for 30 years
Mrs. von Rudi Völler makes Beckenbauer comparison
09/26/2025 – 9:53 amReading time: 2 min.
His life has been about football for almost 50 years. Rudi Völler became world champion, national coach, a legend – now a documentary appears.
Rudi Völler and his wife Sabrina have been married for 30 years. They got to know each other and fell in love with each other in Rome when Völler played at AS Rome (1987 to 1992). In 1990 he also won the world championship title in the “Eternal City”.
Sabrina Völler initially did not understand why he was only called Rudi, as she was talking about her husband in a new documentary (“Rudi Völler – there is only one”, from October 3 at Sky). “It can’t be true that a person is called Rudi,” she said. “In Italy I always called him Rudolfo, but I stayed with Rudolf.”
Over the years, Sabrina Völler also got to know the closest companions of the former world star, including Franz Beckenbauer and Otto Rehhagel. Now she talked about both of them a funny anecdote.
Sabrina Völler about Franz Beckenbauer: “I always like to compare that. Franz Beckenbauer was ‘the emperor’. Often people said to him ‘Mr. Beckenbauer’ and not Franz. And with Rudolf they say Rudi. I don’t know why, because Franz was a super accessible person. But he had another aura, people put him a little higher. Rudi is a bit of Rudi.”
Under the trainer Franz Beckenbauer, Rudi Völler became vice champion in 1986 and in 1990 in Italy. Beckenbauer died in January 2024.
Sabrina Völler about Otto Rehhagel: “We were eating together ten or fifteen years ago. At some point the Otto got up, looked at me, gave me my hand and said: ‘You are like a daughter to me. You can also say coaches to me.'” Then she adds smiling: “Yes, in the family is Otto coach.”
Rudi Völler played from 1982 to 1987 at Werder Bremen under the coach Otto Rehhagel. Both together became runner -up in the Bundesliga several times, but it was never enough for the title. “I won the important titles for that,” said Völler. By this he meant the world championship title and in 1993 winning the newly introduced Champions League with Olympique Marseille.