Picture this. It’s the summer of 2006 on a glitzy street in the German spa town of Baden-Baden. A tan young woman is framed by the flashing lights of paparazzi cameras. She’s sporting a newsboy cap, a cropped logo top, and a pair of bug-eye sunglasses. She is not an A-list actress, nor is she a pop star. She is the wife of Jason Cundy, one of England’s top footballers. This woman is Lizzy Cundy, and after this trip her life will never be the same. After this, she’ll be forever known as an original WAG.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the now 56-year-old, who was married to Cundy from 1994 until 2012, tells Glamour of the European obsession with her and the fellow wives and girlfriends of professional athletes. “Everyone wanted to know what we were doing. It just went crazy. It was like the Beatles.” One memory sticks out. She and several other WAGs were walking down a street of designer shops, and the paparazzi literally “fell over themselves” to get the perfect shot.
“It was like the new rock stars had come to town,” she says.
Fast forward to 2024, and similar scenes are playing out at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium. Since beginning her relationship with Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift has been enacting these now age-old WAG rituals—the pap walks, the carefully planned looks, the all-too-visible VIP boxes—just as Cundy and her crew did nearly 20 years earlier. And all across the country, and across different sports, WAGs are breaking through in big ways, building personal brands and getting famous, with Swift supercharging an already growing trend.
But to really comprehend our current fascination with the WAGs in the US, we need to go all the way back to the women who started it all. Along with Cundy, the original British football (for American readers, soccer) WAGs shot to fame in Baden-Baden in 2006, laying out the blueprint for WAGs to come.
In the UK the WAG phenomenon was a bright but brief flame in the media landscape – one that was extinguished almost as soon as it was lit. By 2010 the original group of wives and girlfriends had largely faded out of the spotlight, and no British WAG group ever really rose up in their place. Nonetheless, their brief moment of stardom changed celebrity culture for good.
An acronym for “wives and girlfriends,” the term WAG first appeared in the early ’00s. Many point to a 2002 Telegraph article, which in turn credited the “staff at the Jumeirah Beach Club” with coining the nickname, as the term’s first appearance. A group of wives and girlfriends of the English national football team were, at the time, “bonding” in Dubai ahead of the World Cup. Among them were Posh Spice, a.k.a. Victoria Beckham (wife of superstar footballer David) and model Katie Price, also known by the stage name Jordan (then the girlfriend of Dwight Yorke).
Perhaps these women, already celebrities in their own right, are part of the reason why the press began to pay attention to the partners of the nation’s football stars. The fascination continued: That year ITV launched Footballers’ Wives, an over-the-top fictional drama complete with a knock-off Posh Spice delightfully named Chardonnay Lane; it ran for four years.
But it wasn’t until 2006 that the WAG went truly stratospheric. The World Cup kicked off in June, and as the players took to the pitch, 22 of their wives and girlfriends checked into the luxurious 1,000-pounds-a-night rooms at Brenner’s Park Hotel in Baden-Baden. Joining Cundy were Beckham, rising Girls Aloud star Cheryl Tweedy (later wife of Arsenal and Chelsea left-back Ashley Cole), Colleen McLoughlin (then the fiancée of Wayne Rooney, who remains England’s second-highest goal scorer), Alex Curran (wife of Liverpool F.C. midfielder Steven Gerrard), Elen Rivas (then married to Frank Lampard, a midfielder for Chelsea F.C.), and Carly Zucker (girlfriend of midfielder Joe Cole).
Cundy and her cohort were a new brand of relatable celebrity. Though Cundy had modeled for Cosmopolitan and Vogue prior to meeting her husband-to-be, Jason, when she was just 19, she wasn’t famous. The daughter of an art director for an advertising agency, Cundy had gone to a Catholic school and lived a relatively sheltered life. It turned out this made her only more appealing.
“Girls could really relate to us,” Cundy says. “They thought, I could be there; that could be me. Everyone wanted to know what we were wearing, what we looked like, what outfit we wore, what mascara we used.”
WAGs were, in many ways, the original influencers. Indeed, in 2009, a survey by More Magazine confirmed that the WAGs had influenced a generation of young women, with 60% of 21-to-25-year-olds claiming they wanted to become a WAG.
But in reality, life as a WAG was far from easy. Looking back on the rise of the WAG, the misogyny embedded in the media coverage is impossible to ignore. The tabloids couldn’t get enough of them. The pages were filled with stories of how the young women spent their time— and their money. According to the tabloids’ reports, it was a summer of excess. They brought too much stuff—Rives allegedly missed her flight to Germany after trying to board with five pieces of hand luggage. They allegedly drank too much champagne and spent too much on designer clothes. They were, as one paper concluded, “hooligans with credit cards.” As one Daily Mail writer practically sneered, “Their lack of imagination and narrowness of outlook is staggering. They possess no curiosity about anything other than clothes, champagne, and their reflections.”
“There are two sides to the coin,” says Cundy of the brutality of the press. “It’s not always a bed of roses, and it’s not always easy. It may look like a beautiful lifestyle, but believe me.”
The tabloids also saw their personal lives as fair game. As Cundy puts it, “The press couldn’t wait to sharpen their knives to look into our relationships.” After the English team was knocked out in the quarterfinal, dashing hopes for the expected trophy, the WAGs were summarily blamed for being a “distraction.”
“That was not really fair,” says Cundy. “A lot of the players want their wives and partners next to them at the games. They want them to be traveling with them. If they score the winning goal at the World Cup, they want their family to be there witnessing it. I think it’s a bit harsh to blame them for being a distraction. It was the papers that wanted them on the front of the pages. I would say, look at the media rather than the girls themselves.”
Of course, there is a long history of the press hounding young women who find themselves in the public eye. “It’s not new,” says Yvonne Tasker, the chair of media and communication at the University of Leeds. “There has always been this fascination with the public presence of certain women, sometimes famous, sometimes notorious.” She points to silent film star Clara Bow as an example.
At the turn of the 21st century, this tradition reached its distasteful peak. “Feminism itself was disdained, but at the same time female independence and ‘empowerment’ was lauded—as long as the woman was also attractive,” says Shelley Cobb, a professor of film and feminist media studies at the University of Southampton, describing the cultural moment during which the WAGs rose to fame.
Because of long-standing class politics in Britain, the country was particularly primed for the kind of coverage that emerged from Baden-Baden.
“The British tabloids in particular took this zeitgeist as an opportunity to punish young women for being uppity, so to speak, and this particularly landed on young women from working class backgrounds who were suddenly thrust into fame [Rooney] and those who were already famous and doubled that through marriage [Beckham],” says Cobb.
Tasker adds, “In quite a British way, the press was policing these women. There was a prurient fascination with women who had come into money and a policing of how they spent it.”
All of this coincided with a period of unprincipled practices in the media. “Previous restrictions about what was considered acceptable seemed to falter,” explains Tasker of the media climate.
In other words, it wasn’t just the relatability and accessibility of these women, but also a perfect storm of postfeminist culture, deep-seated British attitudes towards class, and an unregulated press that set the scene for the rise of the WAG in the UK.
The women who found themselves at the center of this media storm were entirely unprepared. After all, they were the first of their kind. Most of them had no media training, no support, and no guidance.
“We all were overwhelmed,” Cundy recalls. “No one was expecting it. Some of the girls didn’t like it. But the majority of them actually loved it, and really thought, Let’s use this to our advantage.”
That’s exactly what many of the original WAGs did. Cundy, for instance, has since made a career out of the fame of the brief heyday of the WAG era. “I thought, This is business,” she says. She spearheaded WAGS World, a 2008 reality series about her life in the spotlight. She starred in WAG! The Musical at London’s Charing Cross Theater in 2013. And in 2019, she penned a memoir, Tales From the Red Carpet.
“I made a living from it,” she says. “And many of the girls also went on to do big brands, big TV shows. They really milked it.”
After the peak of the WAG at the 2006 World Cup, the phenomenon slowly died down.
Alongside an ethical reckoning for the tabloid press, wives and girlfriends of players were advised to stay home during the 2010 World Cup; the new England manager Fabio Capello wanted to avoid any more “distractions.”
“We are there to play, not for a holiday,” he said at the time. Those who did travel with their partners were only permitted to see them for 24 hours the day after their matches. (It’s worth noting that England actually fared worse in the 2010 World Cup.)
The WAGs slowly faded out of the headlines. The OG British WAGs only really lasted for one generation. As Alice Crossley noted in The Face, a “dull decade for The Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame set in, with B‑list celebs and ex-Love Island stars doing their best to fill the gap the WAGs left behind.”
Today the wives and girlfriends of British footballers seem to take a quieter, more measured approach to any second-hand fame they may glean from their relationships. Just take Katie Goodland, wife of Harry Kane, or Paige Milian, fiancee to Raheem Sterling. Although both women are partners of two of England’s biggest stars and scorers, they both have (relatively) humble follower counts of around 100,000 and rarely appear in tabloid headlines.
But in America it’s a different story. Almost two decades after the rise and fall of the WAG in the UK, she is having her first real moment in the spotlight across the pond. Since Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce began their high-profile relationship, there has been an explosion of interest in a new group of American WAGs.
The main difference is that social media has largely taken the place of the tabloids. Accounts like Deux Moi spread celebrity gossip, while fan accounts and Reddit threads have become places for people to dissect and discuss. “Social media does mean that the scrutiny is now more immediate and direct,” Cobb says. “It’s [no longer] filtered through the tabloids’ lens.”
And while social media means that rumors spread faster and gossip is more vicious, it also gives the new generation of WAGs a little more control. The British WAGs may have been pre-social-media influencers, they had no agency of their own. “Celebrities are now curating or attempting to curate their own social media presence,” says Tasker. “There’s much more awareness of the need to present yourself.”
The current crop of WAGs in America is seemingly smarter and savvier than the original group of Brits. They have media training and press teams and platforms of their own. It’s a new era for the WAG—but there’s no denying that she wouldn’t be who she is today without her origin story.
The post The Original WAGs Were Instant Icons—but Treated as Jokes appeared first on Glamour.
