My life looks glamorous but we’re just a NORMAL FAMILY
Yes, there are designer outfits, luxury holidays, lavish parties and stunning mansions – but Tipperary-reared Cat Harding, who is married to Premier League soccer star Jorginho, insists...
THEY are arguably the most famous men in the world, followed and feted by millions and paid salaries to match. The jet-setting lives of their partners – such as Victoria Beckham, Coleen Rooney and Claudine Keane – are the envy of many an Instagram scroller, as they admire the fabulous frocks, extravagant holidays and thrill of being on the arm of a man hero-worshipped around the globe.
But sometime Tipperary resident and former You’re A Star contestant Cat Harding insists being the partner of a Premier League footballer isn’t what people might expect.
Her fiancé and father of her youngest son Jax is Jorginho – so famous he only needs one name. He’s an Arsenal player and Italian international who Cat met on a dating app and now she is one of the Premier League partners who are set to feature in a new Amazon Prime show called Married To The Game.
As the song might suggest, it’s a long way to Tipperary from the glamorous London pad where Cat and Jorginho live and to which she’s now about to throw open the doors and welcome in the TV-watching public.
‘I don’t actually know why I agreed to do it,’ Cat says as she sits on the edge of her bed during our Zoom call, revealing that at first she was worried that it might be one of those scripted reality shows, which she certainly would have turned down. She adds: ‘When I found out how the show was going to be I thought: OK, this could be quite interesting and I think it could be a good way to show things are not exactly as people think. I thought it would be fun.’
Fun is something you imagine that Cat and Jorginho – or J as she calls him – have a lot of. The Brazilian-born midfielder fell hard for Cat when they met on a dating app, to the point where he was trying to woo her using Google Translate.
‘Do you know when we were telling that story I was thinking we probably shouldn’t be going there and telling this amount of detail,’ Cat says, laughing, when I ask her about it. ‘We met on a dating app and he couldn’t speak any English but I didn’t realise that.
‘He was on Google Translate tricking me for three weeks before we met. Then we met in person and I realised he couldn’t speak English. But he learned very fast – he literally was speaking within a few months. He is super smart with languages so that is a good thing.’
A good thing indeed as the couple are now set to marry in 2025, and for Cat, even before they had actually met, the feelings were strong.
‘I know this is really insane but I felt like I was crazy about him when we were just talking, before we had even met,’ she admits. ‘I remember actually saying to my best friend, “Oh my gosh I am talking to this guy and I am genuinely crazy about him. It’s really mad because I don’t even know him but I feel like I do know him.”
‘After the first time we met I was basically in love with him. It took me a little while to tell him that but I basically knew straight away that, yeah, something clicks here.’
Those with a good memory might recall Cat’s stint on You’re A Star and then later on The Voice UK as one of the protégés of Olly Murs.
She was born in London to parents who were both half-Irish and moved to Ireland at the age of nine. She spent her seminal years in the Tipperary village of Ardcroney and went to Borrisokane Community College, and later to college in Limerick. ‘I moved [to Ireland] when I was eight or nine and moved back to England when I was 19,’ she says. ‘I moved after I was on You’re A Star because I met a producer on that show. I wanted to start writing my own music and performing and things, and he lived in London so I moved over there.’
Her singing career has gone on the back burner now that she has two children – Jax, three, and eight-year-old Ada, who is from a previous relationship with actor Jude Law.
‘When I first met J, I was doing The Voice and I was rehearsing to do some shows again and I had started performing,’ Cat says. ‘He actually came to my first show that I did and that was amazing, but then I found out I was pregnant quite soon after that.
‘Since then I haven’t done as much. I have been doing little bits and pieces but I found it much harder because obviously I have two children now and his schedule is absolutely crazy.
‘I personally wouldn’t want to be going out late in the evenings, doing gigs and performing a lot because I would miss the time with my children and my fiancé. It’s one of those things that you have to, at different stages in your life, prioritise what’s more important.
‘Obviously I absolutely love performing and I do miss it – sometimes a lot – so I would like to have it more in my life. But now I’ve set up my styling business, I love that side of things. It gives me a creative outlet.’
The styling business is Cat Cavelli Curates, which she runs with her best friend Harriet. Cat wants to help women bring out the best in themselves after losing her own sense of style a bit when she first became a mum. It took her a while, she says, to get the confidence back and now she wants to use her styling skills to help others.
‘I’m just kind of building it up slowly at the moment and working on everything,’ she says of the new venture. ‘Everything’s going in the right direction. I try and do it when the kids are at school, when my daughter is at school.
‘My son has got a Brazilian nanny, because we didn’t want to send him to nursery at the moment.
‘We wanted him to learn Portuguese because it’s super, super important.’
Schedules are very important in the household and football comes first – always.
‘The schedule is the main thing,’ Cat says of the hardest part of being with a footballer. ‘The lastminute change of plans, the lack of time together. For instance, on Christmas Day, J would need to train and obviously when most families are spending Christmas Day together, we don’t get to do that really because he has to train and then he has to go and stay in a hotel most of the time on Christmas night.
‘So there are things that people wouldn’t ever even think about. They just think, “Oh, they get loads of holidays”. But he gets holidays like once a year – he can’t book off two weeks in September, it doesn’t work like that.’
There is also no chance of changing plans to fit in a dental appointment for the kids, an emergency pick-up at the school or a meeting about work.
‘Every other thing in your life has to work around his schedule for training and there’s just like no – and I mean no – budging that,’ Cat says.
Jorginho Frello was born in Brazil but moved to Italy as a teenager to play football due to his Italian roots. He has two children, Vitor and Alicia, from his first marriage, to Natalia Leteri. It makes for a busy home and a blended modern
‘Everything in your life has to work around his schedule’
family – in which it’s obvious from what we see on screen that there’s lots of love.
Cat insists there’s also a level of chaos on a daily basis but she always wanted a busy house.
‘I always wanted to have more children, now I don’t want any more,’ she says. ‘I’m done now because I have my boy and my girl and I also have two stepchildren who are amazing.
‘When we have them here there are four children in the house and it is absolutely chaos. So now we are officially done.’
Cat’s parents moved back to England shortly after she did, and, though they live in Kent, her mum is a regular visitor to her London home.
They have a close bond and on the show you will often see that her mum is on hand to help.
Married To The Game also features a number of other footballers’ wives and partners, including Taylor Ward, the partner of Riyad Mahrez, and Sara Gundogan, the wife of Ilkay Gundogan.
Though the couples are evidently not short of a few euro, there are sides of their lives that people will never have seen before.
‘I haven’t seen the show yet and I think that obviously they’re going to put in the parts that look really glamorous and extravagant, like me planning a party,’ says Cat.
‘It looks amazing and everything but that’s obviously not the day-to-day.
‘I don’t know how much of the day-to-day life they’ve also put in – our house is completely chaotic and crazy all the time, there’s always something going on. I wouldn’t personally say every day is glamorous, and if anyone knocked on my door in the morning, they would definitely not think it’s glamorous.
‘There are going to be aspects of it which are obviously really glamorous and amazing – we do have the privilege of having some really amazing opportunities and the places that we go and the things that we can do. We have so much privilege with that and we’re so, so lucky. I’m super grateful for that.
‘So I’m not saying by any means we don’t have an amazing, glamorous life. But I wouldn’t say that’s how our life is – our life is like a normal family, you know?’
On the show, we see Cat wondering if her birthday party will lead to a proposal, and though it didn’t happen at that moment, it did come later on. She wants people to see what happened on screen but says it was certainly romantic.
‘All I can say is he planned something super amazing,’ she says. ‘Obviously I was expecting it – you can see I’m like all the time asking him, “When? When?” so I was thinking, it must be coming soon.
‘But how he actually did it, the way he did it on the night, I actually had zero idea so it was a complete surprise. He tricked me massively and he did something amazing. He’s very thoughtful and very romantic so it was super special. He had my music playing. Yeah, it was amazing.’
But, as is frequently the case in Cat’s life, football comes first and she has had to plan the wedding for 2025.
‘So the wedding is June 2025, which feels like ages away,’ she says, revealing she couldn’t plan for this summer because of the European Championships as she has no idea yet if Jorginho will be playing for Italy.
It’s one thing the series does cast a light on – the uncertainty of life being with a footballer, as we see Taylor Ward and Sara Gundogan having to leave the lives they had made for themselves in Manchester at the drop of a hat to go off and start again somewhere new.
It’s something Cat will have to face at some point and she has made her peace with it.
‘I definitely know it’s in the future,’ she says. ‘That’s what’s going to be coming at some point whether that is this year, next year, in two years, it will happen – that’s just how football works.
‘I get more worried for the kids, my daughter mainly because obviously she’s eight now and she’s nine next month. She reveals that Ada has already moved school once as the couple moved closer to the Arsenal ground when Jorginho signed for them from another London club, Chelsea.
Cat says: ‘I try to speak to her a lot about it and say, “You know, if we have to move to another country or city, the most important thing is that we’re always together, and we have each other and like you can always adapt, you’ll make new friends. You can always keep in contact with a friend that you have here.”
‘It’s hard I think for a child to understand. But I’m trying to get her used to the idea of it. I think it’s been good that we actually only moved across London because I feel like it was a small little step for her and she realised that moving school is not as scary as she thought it was going to be.’
If it happens, Cat will be ready to deal with it, as she deals with most other things, such as the constant scrutiny of being a Premier League player’s partner.
‘I try not to let it affect me too much but it definitely makes you worry about how you’re being portrayed,’ she says. ‘But it’s part and parcel isn’t it, I suppose.’
In the world of Premier League glitz and glamour, we quite often read about footballers having affairs, but Cat’s opinion is that this is a situation that happens in daily life all the time – we just don’t see it in the papers.
‘Everyone has temptation,’ she says. ‘The footballers obviously get it a lot more because they are young, rich and often good-looking so they’re obviously going to have a lot of temptation and a lot of attention from women.’
But Cat says she is really lucky and very happy in her relationship.
‘J has always made me feel super secure in that way and we have a lot of trust for each other,’ she says. ‘We don’t actually go out by ourselves in the evening because we’re both super jealous so I’m not allowed to go to a nightclub and he’s the same.
‘I wouldn’t go on a girls’ holiday or he wouldn’t go on a boys’ holiday or something like that.’
These are things that are unheard of in Jorginho’s culture anyway, Cat insists.
‘I think it actually helps us a lot,’ she says. ‘We love to go on holiday together. We always go out together. If we ever go out in the evening, we like to do it together. I think that’s just something that we’ve put into place in our relationship and find it works for us and it helps us.’
‘I’m not allowed to go to a nightclub and he’s the same’