It’s a lonely life for Wags

As ocean-going metaphors go, the news that a £1 billion cruise liner (usually charging £2,434.80 – love that 80! – for a nine-night jaunt, complete with a shopping mall, 14 jacuzzis, six swimming pools and the longest ‘dry-slide’ at sea) will host England’s Wags during the World Cup in Qatar could not have been more splashy. 

This is a particularly bad time for football. The England players are off to Qatar, along with LGBT-friendly football personalities – led by ‘gay icon’ David Beckham – to shill for a country where migrant workers are treated like chattels, women are treated like children and homosexuals are treated like criminals. 

Like many greedy charlatans, Premier League footballers appear to have used the Black Lives Matter movement as a cover for their own venality, kneeling to indicate that they were part of the solution to social injustice rather than part of the problem. But when taken from the men who died building the World Cup wonderland, it seems black lives didn’t matter one bit.

Where does this leave the Wags? Once seen as lucky working-class girls made good, their stock was knocked by the Wagatha Christie carry-on in which two women who married into money attempted to turn each other into 12 tins of cat food at a cost of millions of pounds.

It’s poignant now to look at those snaps of the 2006 Wags strutting their stuff in Baden-Baden and think of what lay ahead of them as they put their best red-soled foot forward in the shameless sunshine. Cheryl Cole divorced Ashley after he cheated on her with someone he vomited on mid-romp, Danielle Lloyd was stripped of her Miss Great Britain title, Toni Terry would become a figure of fun when her husband John had a fling with his teammate’s fiancée, Coleen Rooney now has four lively sons to keep her busy, and as for Wag Queen Victoria – well, her husband looks a lot happier pootling around an Islamic police state on a motorbike in commercials for Qatar than he ever does with her.

The Wag lifestyle is no longer seen as a goal for girls the way it was when Posh met Dosh, especially in a world where a beauty can monetise herself rather than stand by her man as he is discovered uncovered for the nth time. Think of Love Island, where girls whose ambitions might once have stalled at drinking champagne in a Cheshire hot tub now go on to garner multi-million pound fortunes before they’re old enough to want Botox. 

And could the young Lionesses make the old Wags look any less relevant? Having dreams, ambitions and passions that money can’t buy – and the self-respect that only paying your own way in life can bring – seems far more enviable than being the kept woman of a man who has to take off his boots in order to count up to 20.

Though the Wag life may seem a smorgasbord of shoe-shopping and five-star sunshine, it’s not that great because you have to put up with a professional footballer in order to get your hands on the swag. Spotted in adolescence, few of them ever really mature beyond that point, so with a few exceptions their wives seem to find themselves well-groomed minders of sexually-incontinent overgrown schoolboys. 

Alison Kervin wrote in the Daily Mail in 2010: ‘I got to know a number of Wags because over the past few years I've been researching their world for a series of novels and attempting to find out what their lives are really like away from the headlines. The girls were happy to let me into their homes and to share the secrets of their lives – on the basis that I would never reveal their identities. What I discovered were many poignant scenes – lots of beautiful, painfully slim girls alone in huge, immaculate mansions in the countryside, trying to be perfect while waiting for their husbands to come home. The innate sadness and loneliness of the women is a far cry from the “get dressed in designer labels, drink gallons of champagne and party all night” view of the Wags to which we've grown accustomed.’

Maybe the young women stuck on their ship of fools (though some reports claim that they will lodge on Banana Island, a resort offering £6,000-a-night chalets built on stilts in the Arabian Sea) will use this me-time to reflect on their futures. Because wherever they while away their days flitting from nail-bar to hairdresser, the Wags won’t be seeing their men for the duration. Those fine young specimens will be closeted at the Souq Al-Wakra hotel in Doha – so that they may better concentrate on the arduous task of kicking thousands of ghost-skulls of migrant workers around all that glittering stadia fit for the Beautiful Game.