Tom Brady said football cost him funerals and weddings, and Gisele Bündchen's second marriage gives that line a new weight

Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady (via Getty Images)

Tom Brady once said football cost him funerals and weddings. Four years after he and Gisele Bündchen announced their divorce on Oct. 28, 2022, that line reads differently. Bündchen married former jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente in Surfside, Florida, on Dec.

3, 2025, less than a year after Bündchen and Valente welcomed a baby boy. Brady, now a Fox commentator, has spent the same period fielding tabloid stories about his love life. The contrast between two lives that once ran together is hard to miss, and it raises a fair question about what Brady's comment really meant.

He did, though he never tied it to Bündchen. Brady made the remark on his podcast in 2022, while his marriage was coming apart in public.

He was describing what two decades in the NFL had taken from his personal life. "And I can't be at funerals and I can't be at weddings," Brady said. He did not name his wife. He did not have to. Soon after, the couple confirmed the marriage was over.

Tom Brady's divorce. (Image via Getty Images)

Context matters here. Brady was speaking about the sport's cost in general, and reading it as a message to one person goes too far. But the timing shaped how it landed. Bündchen had told Elle weeks earlier that she had concerns about his return from a February retirement, and reports had already tied the strain at home to that decision.

Brady's words arrived in a house that, by many accounts, had stopped running on the same schedule.

That sequence is why the funerals and weddings line was read as more than a podcast aside.

She has built a quieter, family-first life. In her split statement, she said her priority had always been Benjamin and Vivian, and that she and Brady had grown apart. Three years later she married Valente, and the family now includes a baby son.In February 2026, she joined a social media trend by sharing a 2016 time capsule. The post centered on motherhood and personal growth. Brady did not appear in it.One post proves little, and tabloids covered the omission anyway. It does show where her attention sits right now: on her children and on the home she is building with Valente, away from the NFL calendar that shaped her first marriage. One tabloid claimed she knows about the rumors linking Brady to Alix Earle and has chosen not to engage, but that report is unverified.

Brady has built a second career away from the field, calling games for Fox. It keeps his Sundays tied to the league, only from the booth instead of the pocket. He has told PEOPLE he has little time for a personal life. Rumors have followed him anyway, from a 2023 link to Irina Shayk to chatter about Earle, an influencer, after videos from a St. Barts New Year's Eve event showed the two talking and laughing. None of it is confirmed.

His line about funerals and weddings was about time, and that is the most useful way to read it today. Brady spent his time on the game. Bündchen is spending hers on a new family. As far as public reports show, Brady has never linked his old comment to her wedding, so the connection belongs to readers, not to him. Plenty of readers will still make it.