“Nothing like this will happen again,” said the head bartender at Garibaldi, an Italian restaurant in the sleepy German town of Baden-Baden, sobbing on a reporter’s shoulder. It was the 2006 World Cup, England had just lost to Portugal on penalties, and the waves that came, bought and conquered were now leaving. Peak Wag lasted just a few weeks: Coleen McLoughlin brought in a spray-tan technician and spent £57,000 in an hour; Victoria Beckham packed 60 pairs of sunglasses and complained about being treated worse than a dog when her flight was delayed; Abbey Clancy was sent home early after pictures emerged of her taking cocaine. They drank Red Bull vodka, pink champagne and pear Bellinis, and Elen Rivas climbed up on a table to belt out Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
Twenty years and five World Cups later, everyone is feverishly nostalgic for this good old time. At the time, these straight ladettes were branded by the tabloids as ultra-feminine, ultra-gauche gold diggers who lived to spend their husbands’ money – as satirized by ITV Wives of footballers (2002), where Beckham’s representative is a glamorous model named Chardonnay. The Equality and Human Rights Commission officially criticized the word “Wag” – women and girlfriends – as offensive and demeaning. Today, the revulsion has faded and all that remains is a camp legend. Gen Z makes TikTok memes of Victoria Beckham’s outfits. Can we name any of the wives or girlfriends of any of Tuchel’s squad? Where has Wag gone?
Wags have emigrated. They no longer reside in Daily Mailthe sidebar of shame. Not now that they own the means of production. On TikTok or Instagram, they share a laid-back table of M&S grocery stores, sun holidays, kids in miniature football shirts, beauty routines and outfits of the day.
Today’s Wags are aesthetically pleasing to lifestyle space dwellers, able to modify and monetize their private lives. Take Morgan Riddle, the ex-girlfriend of American tennis player Taylor Fritz, who first gained recognition for a viral TikTok: “GRWM to go to a tennis match.” This wink at who he was dating attracts all women: it could be you. It is also a sign of the times – fans are increasingly parasocial, concerned with the entire orbit of the athlete. By publicizing her Wimbledon experience beyond the velvet rope, Riddle has consequently built an engaged audience of 18-34-year-old women (a demographic coveted by brands).
Others are hiding in plain sight. The internet has agreed that it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend, and a class of new Wags aren’t immune. Queen among them is F1 Wag Alexandra Leclerc, an art history graduate who started dating Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc in 2022, just like the Netflix documentary Travel to survive set his star to fly. Leclerc, a modern-day Grace Kelly, benefits from discretion, sharing a gilded Riviera life of yachts and sunsets while her audience speculates about her relationship in the comments section.
Wags like Leclerc generate a feeding frenzy for brands. Paige Lorenze, who is dating American tennis player Tommy Paul, said Forbes she had as many brand deals as he did during the US Open 2024. Sponsored social media content and event appearances are her bread and butter. Entrepreneurship is commonplace: Riddle founded 400club, a community to champion female fans in sports, F1’s Carmen Montero Mundt co-founded skincare brand Barriers, while Tolami Benson (Bukayo Saka’s fiancee) launched a collection with iconic brand River Island just before the World Cup. Leclerc did the same earlier this year with jeans brand Frame, coinciding with the Miami Grand Prix. When asked about Leclerc’s appeal, brand co-founder Jens Grede told Forbes: “She looks like a fairy tale, her life is a fairy tale, her wedding looked like a fairy tale. She is married to the prince.”
Wags are the chosen ones. Georgina Rodríguez is casually working late, a favor for a colleague, when Cristiano Ronaldo walks in and spins her world in a golden ensemble of private jets and chefs, Birkin bags, Bugattis and diamond rings. All this, “thanks to love,” says Rodríguez in the opening of her eponymous 2022 Netflix reality TV series, Soy Georgina (I’m Georgina). She lives happily ever after; The series enters the top ten of Netflix in 62 countries.
This Cinderella story, executive produced by Rodríguez, is a lightning rod for heteronormativity. In the trailer, Unidentified group members say: “Family is what makes her truly happy. The most loving and caring mother.” On Instagram, where she has 73.4 million followers, she mixes images of idyllic family life and children’s birthday parties among spon-cons for Saudi Arabia tourism, private jets, red carpets and high-end jewelry ads. This is the main narrative swallowed and revived by her audience: a TikTok fan of Rodríguez on her stepfather’s birthday, titled “Georgina is such a good mother,” has been liked 426,600 times.
If there was ever any doubt that this is a straight-up fairy tale, consider a recent World Cup Instagram post by Megan Pickford, wife of England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford: “No suitcase mishap would stop me from supporting my husband,” she wrote, under a photo of herself smiling in a denim cowboy hat emblazoned with his number. Football has a specific commercial climate: there are only five gay footballers in the world. In the women’s game, where 12 percent of players are openly LGBTQ+ (as of the 2023 World Cup), only those with independent celebrity partners receive any media coverage, such as I am a famous man contestant GK Barry, whose girlfriend is Ipswich Town footballer Ella Rutherford.
Wags are often explicitly apolitical and overtly brand-friendly, just like the average conservative-coded Instagram women, influencers who share happy husbands and babies, prioritize homemaking, and performatively make soap from scratch. “Social media rewards certain types of content—polished, aspirational, often family-oriented,” says Ali Hasaan, author of “Building the WAG brand“‘, “(Wags) are still working within a system that favors a particular image of femininity.”
Cinderella and Prince Charming are a common brand. Morgan Riddle and Taylor Fritz combined star power for Heineken’s L0VE.L0VE marketing campaign, promoting the brand’s non-alcoholic beer. Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch have Therapy Crouch, a podcast where they share with each other, diagnosing listeners’ relationship problems.
A Wag will stain her partner’s world by association, especially useful in this line of work: being a good player is temporary, being a good family man is forever. Just as politicians need to be married to be trusted by the electorate, Wags can broaden their partner’s appeal to a more brand-ready position — a key long-term consideration, given that many retire early. “Reputation softening”, Hasani calls it.
To some extent, this is part and parcel of being a woman in the public eye. From Hillary Clinton to Coleen Rooney, standing by your man has always been a soft-power defensive move to ward off the stench of sexual impropriety. In 2018, after a model publicly accused Ronaldo of sexually assaulting her in Las Vegas a decade earlier, Rodríguez wrote on Instagram: “You always transform the obstacles put in your way into the drive and strength to show how amazing you are…I love you @cristiano.”
Rather than being a thorn in the side of attention, a Wag is a stabilizing force, an evergreen money maker, able to speak directly to a largely young female audience previously ignored by the sports industry. You might not have noticed because you’re not necessarily her audience and she’s too smart to get dragged into a mainstream tabloid hoo-ha.
While the culture is turning and marriage and babies are making a comeback, no one Wag fits all. Lots of lawyers, nurses, PR, normal women with normal jobs. But the Wags who define the new class are influencers, raking in the big bucks through an Instagram-friendly network that appeals to everyone from L’Oréal Paris to the Saudi Tourism Board. Cinderella is laughing her way to the bank, producing her fairy tale.
(Further reading: It’s not the phones)
