‘It’s not like Badenbaden where we’ll go out and get drunk and dance on tables’

down the country aspired to be a WAG, which seemed to involve little more than strutting into and falling out of nightclubs, and doing up mansions in Alderley Edge.

The 2018 set seem a slightly more restrained bunch, worlds away from one Spanish newspaper’s assessment that they are “hooligans with visas”. “It’s not like Baden-baden where we’ll go out and get drunk and dance on tables,” Rebekah Vardy, their nominal ringleader, told Loose Women. Instead, the current breed are said to be spending their time away arranging activities for the children on the group Whatsapp, and going out for girlie dinners. That said, Vardy has spent an estimated £150,000 on a private jet, hiring two security guards and taking her full-time nanny to Russia.

But most are twentysomething, university-educated, working women. Lucia Loi, Marcus Rashford’s other half, recently graduated and works in PR; Jordan Pickford’s long-term girlfriend Megan Davison (the most prolific instagrammer of the bunch, with 14.5k followers) recently graduated with a 2:1 from Sunderland, and Annabel Peyton works as an air hostess with Emirates, through which she met her fiancé Jack Butland on a flight from Dubai.

Some things don’t change, though. As their other halves prepared for their final group game against Belgium, the girls dressed up for a night out in St Petersburg; gathering outside their hotel, flicking their hair before lining up for a prom girl photo. You could easily have been watching a scene from 2006, or even 1966.

The WAGS may well be stuck in a time warp, but we wouldn’t have them any other way.