From 2006 to 2024 - A Revisionist History of the WAG

Words: Jennifer Jasmine White

Make it stand out

This summer, English football has returned to our screens with the age old promise - it’s coming home. Despite a historic association with hyper-masculinity, it goes without saying that the sport is no longer solely a matter for the boys. Women have long been part of English football, but via the global success of the Lionesses, the cult resurgence of Knightley’s Bend it Like Beckham, and the increasing popularity of grassroots women’s teams and organisations like INDIVISA, the cultural conversation has never been so open to the confluence of football and femininity. Social media is awash with “guides to the Euros for the girlies” but if you should find yourself in the pub in an England baby tee and a fresh fake tan, spare a moment for the pioneers upon whose shoulders you sit. Spare a moment, that is to say, for those long done-dirty iconoclasts: the WAGS. 

The Euros matches marked the first international competition held in Germany since the 2006 world cup. Many speculated as to what that return will mean for the tone of the tournament, but for others, this homecoming can only bring one thing to mind. It was in Germany, in 2006, that the English WAGs were born. The frenzied heights of WAG culture feel a long way from England manager Gareth Southgate’s M&S fits, and it seems there is little room for that first generation of footballers’ wives in emerging histories of the modern match. The WAGS have no significant role to play, for instance, in James Graham’s recent and much celebrated dramatisation of England’s football team: Dear England. These women have been reduced to an embarrassing cultural footnote, permissible only in the pages of Heat magazine. 

Yet as Southgate strives to rearticulate English national identity and its relationship to the beautiful game, he might want to look briefly back to 2006 for some important truths. More than just a treasured archive of noughties aesthetics, the history of the WAG is a history of classed femininity, rampant cultural misogyny, and sporting spectacle. In earnest tribute to the likes of Cheryl, Victoria and Coleen, it’s a history crying out to be revised.
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WAG-mania was born in Baden-Baden, a small town in the German Black Forest. Twenty-minutes away from the England team themselves, it was chosen as a peaceful retreat for dutiful wives-and-girlfriends, but what followed couldn’t be further from isolated serenity: £60,000 spent on a one-hour shopping trip, champagne until 4AM, and sixty pairs of sunglasses were among the subjects of endless headlines, though many of the most outrageous claims have since been revealed as false. The trip was described as a “hen-party on steroids” and the whole episode was to go down in history. It would impact managerial strategy for years to come, prompting Fabio Capello to severely limit the presence of partners during the 2010 world cup. 

Though it would only take on its current significance on that feted trip, the idea of the WAG has a longer history. In 1972, Bobby Moore’s wife Tina was photographed sporting thigh-high back leather boots and a white mini dress emblazoned with the three-lions crest. The look is by no means a million miles away from Victoria Beckham’s “England Rocks” vest top, and the central impulse remains the same: attractive wife uses material culture to soft pedal English nationalism in the name of marital bliss. Neither look would be out of place in your average East-London pub come match day, and we’ll no doubt see such iconography ironically plastered across social media this summer. Such uses are generally celebratory, but they also make it easy for WAG culture to be recuperated at a purely nostalgic, aesthetic level. To do so is to fall foul of the suggestion that these women are significant only as opportunities for novelty dress-up. 

Many have argued that WAG is itself an offensive term, reliant on heteronormative generalisations and reducing women’s lives to the sole achievements of their male partners. Though the former point is inescapable, to fully accept the second is to fail to acknowledge the extent to which many of these women carved out the WAG brand for themselves. Their capacity to do so, effectively becoming wealthy and successful via calculated utilisations of male status, is arguably what was quite so threatening to the media establishment. That many of these women have continued to do so, from Victoria as global fashion authority, to Coleen in “Wagatha” mode on the cover of British Vogue, is testament to the longevity of that savviness.

“To suggest that what happens during those sacred ninety minutes is somehow completely detached from gossip, bitchy rivalry, body politics and psychodrama is wishful thinking from those that would have us believe that football is not only a boys’ club, but one far holier than the likes of tabloids”

Nonetheless, it’s a welcome change that the likes of Kate Kane aren’t subject to the same simplified scrutiny, particularly given the underlying issues that criticisms of these women often masked. A close relation of the ladette, but a generation prior to the reclamatory “huns,” the WAGS were just one episode in a longer series of “vulgar” and “excessive” women, to be derided for their backgrounds and appearances. Such derision was most visible in constant references to orange skin and “gold-digger” girls, as despite its deep grounding as a working-class sport, the likes of Coleen Rooney, and her partnership with supermarket fashion brand George at Asda, were deemed too cheap for international football.

The biggest criticism of the WAGS, however, was rooted in the apparent distraction that they provided from the oh-so-serious matter of football itself. Rio Ferdinand famously dubbed their presence “like a circus,” as “football became a secondary element.” It was their role as a spectacle that was most egregious to commentators across the country, and they were widely blamed for England’s loss in 2006. Leaving aside the fact that England performed worse under Capello’s wifeless regime, the notion of modern football as separable from spectacle is the biggest joke of all. 

To suggest that what happens during those sacred ninety minutes is somehow completely detached from gossip, bitchy rivalry, body politics and psychodrama is wishful thinking from those that would have us believe that football is not only a boys’ club, but one far holier than the likes of tabloids. In its economics, transmission methods, and the following it inspires, modern football is at its root a form of mass entertainment. Watching the WAGs was like “watching theatre unfold,” said Ferdinand, but what is football if not a form of popular, improvised performance? Unlike in sports like boxing, where the likes of Tyson Fury embrace the frivolous flamboyance of his game, this remains something of a sad suppressed secret for many football fans. 

The WAGS provide an archive of admittedly enviable outfits, tell an important story about our recent cultural history, and remind us of the malicious capacities of the British tabloid press. Above all though, their biggest crime was their greatest gift: they threatened to expose the fun-filled theatricality at the core of football, and paved the way for those of us historically excluded from it to throw on a shirt and dive into the drama. Faced with those who insist on the deadly male impenetrability of sports more generally, they’re still a powerful, diamante studded weapon.