The love lives of athletes they’ve been a national obsession for basically as long as we’ve had professional athletes: Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s relationship was big news in the ’50s, for example. Then and for a long time after, our interest generally centered on pairings like these where an established celebrity was paired with a sports icon and their combined star power made it impossible to look away.
Then came the world cup 2006, which brought the England team to the sleepy spa town of Baden-Baden, Germany. This was a year after the debut of TMZIn the burgeoning days of America’s toxic preoccupation with party girls like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, media companies were beginning to understand what they could do online with celebrity gossip. The 24/7 news cycle was hungry for women to ogle and hate in equal measure, and found them prepared in the wives and girlfriends of England players.
Among them were some established tabloids, most notably Victoria Beckham (married, of course, to David) and pop star Cheryl Tweedy (then engaged to Ashley Cole, a left-back for the England team). But the group also included many women who would not otherwise be famous. And they didn’t duck, instead courting headlines going shopping, dancing on the tables, and generally running a media circus that lasted until his teammates were kicked out of the tournament in the first round of the knockout stage.
That was how the rest of the world met the wagan acronym that had been circulating in the British press for a few years at the time. Literally speaking, a WAG is simply the wife or girlfriend of an athlete. But the WAG, as seen in Baden-Baden, lodged itself in the public consciousness, creating an identity that indicated a particular guy of a woman, living a particular kind of life. The prototypical WAG is young, white, slim, handsome and, if possible, blond. She is also shallow, tasteless, and obsessed with status. She lives to drink rosé wine, go to parties and spend her husband’s money.
There was an immediate reaction to the term, especially from the wives themselves: “‘Don’t call me a joker,'” Tweedy said the Standard, making sure to clarify that she didn’t need a rich husband to look after her: she did her shopping and clubbing on her own money, thank you very much.
It did not matter. The jargon, and its associations, stuck. By 2010, the New York Times noted that the New Jersey Nets “may be next to last in the league in scoring and middle of the road in rebounding, but they can compete with the best in WAG.” (One of her strikers, Kris Humphries, was dating Kim Kardashian at the time.) In 2015, E! debuted a reality show called WAG LAwhich would become the first in a Housewives-style franchise that eventually included miami and atlanta also. Then in 2019 we got the W. A. Gatha Christie scandal: WAG football Coleen Rooney’s claims that fellow WAG Rebekah Vardy had been leaking details about her to the tabloids…and that she had the private Instagram posts to prove it. The story was juicy and funny, but it didn’t do much to dispel the notion that the WAG life was for fundamentally mean and catty women, who had nothing better to do than spy on each other and then rat on the press about it.
Throughout it all, the WAGs that received the most attention were almost always famous or associated with extremely well-known players. If you can name an American WAG, chances are it’s someone like Ayesha Curry or Brittany Mahomes, women whose husbands land multi-million dollar contracts and endorsement deals.
But there are 15 players on every NBA roster. The NHL allows 23, the MLB allows 40, and the NFL maxes out at 53. And most of those players aren’t even close to being brand players. The lowest paid make the league minimum, which is still a lot of money: between $700,000 and $1 million, depending on the sport. But that’s only if they can stay on the list all year. Moving down from the top tier doesn’t remove them from the pros, but it can cost them substantial income. Baseball players, for example, don’t have guaranteed contracts, which meant that if you were sent to the minors during the 2022 season, your salary would plummet from $700,000 to $57,200.
Which still aren’t poverty wages, to be sure. But for these athletes, the uncertainty about money is compounded by other kinds of uncertainty, primarily about where you live, possible injuries, and an ever-aging body. A gamer’s romantic partner is subject to these same pressures: fluctuations in income, abrupt changes in living situation, and worries about the future. But she puts up with them in the service of someone else’s dream. And even if he travels quite regularly, she spends a good part of the year alone, which becomes especially difficult if the couple has children.
This it’s life for most professional athletes and their wives; there are many, many more Allison Kucharczyks than Ayesha Curries. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the most compelling social media content comes from women in this situation, whose husbands are living the dream, albeit in a somewhat precarious way, and whose lives, as a consequence, are both aspirational and relatable. .
