A World Cup that celebrates the every wag
If Baden-baden was all about glamour, this time families top the bill, says Hannah Betts
On Saturday night, the England team celebrated their World Cup victory over Sweden not with riotous carousing, but by sitting down to break bread with their wives and children. Manager Saint Gareth Southgate, who called his own spouse back home from the tunnel post-match, enthused: “The players have their families with them. We are going to keep that tradition of them coming in and having dinner with us. Those things have played their part. I think we’ll enjoy it – and then we go again.”
If one were looking for evidence of how England’s World Cup approach has changed over the last 12 years, this would be it. Gone is the swagger, bravura and gender segregation of 2006’s besieging of Baden-baden. Back then, our golden boys operated under a notorious sex ban, leaving their golden girls – christened Wags, or “wives and girlfriends” – to run wild in an orgy of conspicuous consumption: all hot pants, highlights and sauvignon-fuelled high jinks.
Where once Queen Victoria had ruled the roost in this sleepy spa town, so we had self-appointed queen Victoria Beckham lording it over the likes of Cheryl Tweedy (then about to marry Ashley Cole), Elen Rivas (then fiancée of Frank Lampard), Alex Curran (partner of Steven Gerrard) and young pretender Coleen Mcloughlin (fiancée of Wayne Rooney), who famously found it necessary to bring her spray tanner with her. The posse held court at the £1,000-a-night Brenners Park Hotel, from which they led sorties to designer boutiques.
Flash-forward just over a decade and there’s no need for a sex ban because everyone’s brought the nippers – newborns, even, in wingback Ashley Young and wife Nicky Pike’s case. Katie Goodland, captain Harry Kane’s intended, is pregnant with their second child, while several players – among them John Stones, Gary Cahill and Jordan Pickford – have been with their partners since their early teens.
Childhood sweethearts have replaced the filthy locker room talk of old, and many of the women are self-made and educated, such as
Pickford’s other half,
Megan Davison, who graduated from the University of
Sunderland last year: truly, we are now in the age of the “everywag”
– women just like you and me.
Warrior woman
Rebekah Vardy, wife of
Jamie, has even rejected the designation altogether, demanding that she and her peers be treated as people in their own right. “Wag is a dated term because we’re not defined by what our husbands do. We’re individuals,” the former I’m a
Celebrity contestant declared. However, all were lumped together by Russian trolls lambasting them as “The
Hags”, “ugly” and “bears”. Swedish fans repeated the insult, chanting: “Go home to your ugly wives.”
Wag demeanour is also different. To be sure, there is “stunning lingerie model, Ruby Mae”, as the tabloids never fail to describe her, inamorata of Tottenham’s Dele Alli. Moreover, there’s still a tendency towards an aesthetic comprised of big hair, bigger bags, and “jeans and ’eels”, with night-out finery encompassing crop tops, micro-minis and bodycon dresses, as if the last 12 years of fashion hadn’t happened.
However, the glory days of pantomime strutting and posing are behind us. Today’s Wags are about what they do, not what they look like, meaning that many of them look reassuringly normal. We have seen them in denim and football shirts, and guises more Zara than Cavalli. The majority are brunettes, rather than skunkily streaked blondes: women simply getting on with it. Not goldengirl glam, as in the exotic creatures of 2006, but contentedly glamordinary.
There are several reasons for this sea change. One obvious influence is the charming Mr Southgate, a man who has not only reinvented how we package sporting prowess, but how we perceive masculinity. Where once the not-particularly beautiful game was embodied by the rather flash David Beckham, so now it is personified by a man whose focus on the traditional English values of modesty, politeness, niceness and hard graft has restored us to ourselves.
Far from attempting some sort of mutual branding exercise, Southgate’s wife, Alison, isn’t even in Russia. As one insider remarks: “I don’t know much about Gareth – which is one of the reasons he’s such a decent bloke.” His habit of cupping his young team members’ faces is beautiful to behold: benevolent, paternal, literally a steadying hand – ridding them of the scrofula of their testosterone.
His players are in his own image: not established stars who followed a gilded path, as in 2006, rather youngsters forced to fight their way up on loan at unfashionable clubs, while international players got all the attention. Similarly hard-working, they are less loaded and lunatic.
Football’s changing face – male and female – no less reflects the spirit of the age. Baden-baden took place in period of prelapsarian, prerecessionary bling. Today, we are mired by uncertainty: national, as global. No one is feeling flush, not even Croesus-rich footballers. The #Metoo campaign means that casual misogyny of the sort that berated women for their partners’ failings is no longer tolerated. Cometh the hour, cometh the everywag.