The best influencers in Germany

Thomas Müller won thirteen league titles and two Champions League trophies with Bayern Munich, plus a World Cup in 2014. Since 2025 he has played in Vancouver, where he took the Canadian Championship in his first season and reached the MLS Cup final with the Whitecaps; he then covered the 2026 World Cup on television for MagentaTV, alongside Jürgen Klopp.

Pamela Reif still makes the workouts and the recipes herself. What hangs off them by now is a company: the snack brand Naturally Pam, the skincare label ela.beauty and the Pam App, which turned five in 2026. In 2020 she topped the German-language Forbes “30 under 30” list, and in China, where her videos were copied without her first, she has built a second audience of some 74 million people with a business partner.

After the cup win in May 2026, Lukas Podolski took over 86 percent of Górnik Zabrze — the club he had last played for himself. What he shows is life inside it, right down to the choreographies of its ultras. Alongside run businesses with no football in them at all, from the Mangal kebab chain to the Glücksgefühle festival, headlined in 2026 by the Backstreet Boys and David Guetta.

In 2026 Business Insider listed Caroline Daur among the fifty most influential people in Germany, as an entrepreneur and as an actress. The bulk of her work is still fashion editorial: covers for 032c and Numero Istanbul, campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Tiffany. Whenever the German national team plays, a series of her own carries on as well — “we are Germans in”, followed by whichever city she happens to be in.

Katja Krasavice says the lines nobody else will, and turns them into rap. She started on YouTube in 2014 and has been a full-time musician since her 2020 debut album “Boss Bitch”; the criticism aimed at her became a line of its own, “Selfmade aus eurem Hass”, self-made out of your hatred. Beyond the music there is the SUGARMAMI label, an iced tea with BraTee and a shop under her name.

One motif keeps returning over three years with Max Haase: Angel Falls in Venezuela's Canaima park, with kitesurfing on Fuerteventura in between and the west coast of Europe, which he sailed down in his own boat. Whole countries book him these days — the tourism boards of New Zealand, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Julia Willecke finished second on “Let's Dance” and has played Lilly in the ZDF series “Frühling” since 2017. None of it has changed her tone; she still writes short, dry notes about ordinary days, in which her own hair colour is a running joke. She owns two brands as well, a perfume and a matcha line, and makes the podcast “Die Nervigen” with Joey.

Under the name Nordic Scott, Mirko teaches other people how to film themselves without a crew, in clips rarely longer than a few seconds. In front of his own camera are cars and cruise ships, shot for Audi, Volkswagen and Mein Schiff. It started in 2016 with a smartphone; the first proper camera came a year later.

Title, ingredient list, method, a short video. Stefano Zarrella has stuck to that sequence. Who stands at the stove beside him changes constantly — his sister-in-law, his brother, his father. Between the recipes come short lines about his family, and anything more private than that he keeps elsewhere.

In 2017 Bella became the first German beauty YouTuber to put out an eyeshadow palette under her own name; it sold out within hours. Beside the hair and make-up tutorials there is now a product from Origins carrying her name, and on Fridays she talks on her podcast “Enge Freunde” about friendship, confidence and getting older.

Benny and Angie make short videos about life with three children, usually with one of them setting the other up. They have been cooking with Stefano Zarrella for three years now, starting with a carbonara recipe. In September 2025 that turned into a shared cookbook, “Schmackofatz für Groß und Klein”. They married in June 2025, in a barn.

Since 2016 Philipp Hehmann has been one of the loudest German voices in menswear, showing it in loafers, linen and Cartier, shot in Portofino and in Monaco. Since 2024 he has sold the style itself, as the fragrance label Casa Far Niente, founded with two Frankfurt entrepreneurs, composed in Paris and made in Germany.

With Ibo Ahmiane it is about the basics, not about insider tips. Anyone who turns up with ice baths and five-a.m. alarms gets pushed back on in public. What he does instead is work through inheritance tax down to the section number, savings rates and the difference between thematic and global ETFs, putting a question to his audience under every explanation.

Lifeguard, firefighter, vet — in his short sketches Nico Stank plays every part himself. The other half of his work is less well known: he acted opposite Elyas M’Barek in “Liebesdings”, took a lead role in Karoline Herfurth's “Einfach mal was Schönes” and appeared in the 2025 Netflix series “Alpha Männchen”, which reached number two in the series charts. On his podcast “Niccis Quickie” he hosts guests such as Torsten Sträter and Bettina Böttinger.

“Ja, wat macht man so op'n Land?” — what does one actually do out in the country? Annemarie Paulsen asks it herself and answers literally: 450 hectares, 320 dairy cows, organic since 2017, run together with her husband. Add recipes from the farm kitchen and a recurring bit part called “Bauer Helmut”. In 2022 the DLG named her agricultural influencer of the year; her book “Alles büddn wild” followed in 2024.