Gisele Bündchen ended her 13-year marriage to Tom Brady in 2022 with three words, according to a forthcoming biography: “We’re not compatible.”
The line, attributed to an insider close to Brady in Lars Anderson’s “Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness,” is the latest account of a split that friends and tabloids have long tied to football. Brady’s own words from 2017 already established the pattern. After Super Bowl LI, he said his wife asked him to quit — three times that night.
The documented retirement campaign did not stop there. Bündchen enlisted Brady’s friends. She wrote him a letter. She asked again after later championships. Brady kept playing until he was 45. The marriage did not.
On Feb. 5, 2017, the New England Patriots completed the largest comeback in Super Bowl history, rallying from a 28-3 deficit to beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 in overtime. Bündchen and the couple’s children came onto the field. According to Anderson’s book, her first words were not congratulations. They were: “Would now be the perfect time to retire?”
Brady hugged her and acted as if he had not heard the question, Anderson writes. She asked again later that night. After a third attempt, Brady answered: “Too bad, babe. I’m having too much fun right now.”
The next day, Brady repeated the story on SiriusXM NFL Radio.
“If it was up to my wife, she would have me retire today,” he said. “She told me that last night three times. And I said, ‘Too bad, babe, I’m having too much fun right now.’”
That is three asks, on the record, from the quarterback himself, within hours of a sixth Super Bowl title. He was 39. He had already said he wanted to play until 45.
The night of Super Bowl LI was the most famous attempt. It was not the last.
Weeks later, the family vacationed with Jay Feely, Brady’s former Michigan teammate and an NFL kicker. Bündchen asked Feely to convince Brady to retire and to frame it as leadership for the family. Feely later told Sports Illustrated’s Greg Bishop she was “dead serious.” Feely declined. He told Brady to play as long as he wanted. Brady winked.
In 2018, Michael Strahan recounted a dinner at which Bündchen approached him and said, “Michael, you need to talk to my husband.” Her reason: When they met, Brady said he wanted 10 more years. She had been with him five years. He still said he wanted 10 more years.
After the Patriots lost Super Bowl LII to the Philadelphia Eagles in February 2018, Anderson writes that Bündchen gave Brady a handwritten letter. She said the marriage was not working. She needed him present at home — not on his phone, not replaying the game in his head. She needed more help with the children, a chance to sleep in, and time for her own career. Brady kept the letter in a drawer and reread it, the book says.
Some later recaps place another retirement ask after the 2019 Super Bowl win. Brady’s contemporaneous 2017 interview remains the cleanest count: three times in one night, then a years-long campaign that included friends, a letter, and public jokes that were not only jokes.
In an April 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, Bündchen said she had stopped asking. “It’s not my decision to make,” she said. “It’s his decision, and he knows it.”
He kept deciding to play.
Joaquim Valente is Bündchen’s husband. He is a Miami jiu-jitsu instructor and co-founder of Valente Brothers.
Around 2021, the family moved to Florida when Brady signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The children trained there. So did she. Valente and his brothers later appeared with her in a Dust magazine shoot.
Romance rumors followed the divorce. The pair were photographed in Costa Rica in November 2022, weeks after the split was announced, with her children. Sources close to Bündchen said they were friends first. People later reported they began dating in June 2023. Bündchen told The New York Times in 2024 that claims she dated Valente while still married to Brady were “a lie,” and that women who leave relationships are often branded unfaithful.
Some people around Brady have told tabloids the relationship started earlier.
