Media Representations of Footballers' Wives

A Wag's Life

J. Bullen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137335685
• eBook ISBN: 9781137335692
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Representing a detailed analysis of footballers' wives and their role in contemporary British culture, this books explores how the generic and stereotypical 'Wag' has been created by newspaper and magazine coverage, auto/biographies and influential television programmes.

1

Introduction

Since the 2006 World Cup the figure of the ‘wag’ (wife and girlfriend) has become a term used to describe all footballers’ wives. The following quote demonstrates how the wag has become a symbol that represents a caricatured and exaggerated female figure and has become a media phenomenon:

A typical WAG is recognised by her fake tan, hair extensions, oversized sunglasses and the arm-breaking, oversized designer bag she is carrying. Some Wags have managed to turn their status into a ‘job’. Wayne Rooney’s bride-to-be Coleen has a reported £8 million fortune thanks to a perfume range, book, TV and fitness DVD deals and a column in Closer magazine.

(Sheridan, 2008, Daily Mail [online])

The origin of the term ‘wag’ is difficult to pinpoint, as is its precise meaning and connotations. According to the ‘Ephraim Hardcastle’ column in the Daily Mail, it was first used by novelist Jilly Cooper in her book Polo (2006:17). Another press report claims it was an acronym used by the Football Association (FA) (France 2004 Observer) and one of my inter-viewees was told that it came from the City where workers referred to their wives and girlfriends as ‘wags’. Since David and Victoria Beckham became a couple in 1997, football and celebrity have become heavily entwined and footballers’ wives became part of the staple diet of the celebrity press. Whatever its precise origins, the wag captured the public’s imagination during the 2006 World Cup. Since then depictions in newspapers and celebrity magazines have worked together to construct a number of discourses about women married to footballers and those who aspire to marry them. The wag provides a spectacular figure in the media and according to sports journalist and author of The Wags Diary and A Wag Abroad Alison Kervin, the appeal of the wags is:

on a dull day we’ve got pictures of politicians going in and out of parliament and pictures of rain soaked county halls and then you’ve got this mad woman with heels like this and she’s staggering along and she’s, you think who’s this?

(2008, personal interview)

Overall however, the term has become a shorthand representation for a specific type of workingclass woman who is deemed hyper-feminine, hyper-consumptive and a gold-digger.

The coverage of these women demonstrates how media representations of certain women can be seen as part of a postfeminist media culture. According to Tasker and Negra (2005:107), ‘by the late 1990s representational verisimilitude required an acknowledgement of feminism as a feature of the cultural milieu’. They claim that in popular culture certain kinds of female agency are packaged as commodities and at the same time ideas of postfeminism assume that gender equality has been achieved, while simultaneously associating such equality with loss. McRobbie (2009) goes further and asserts that in a postfeminist world it is seen as a high-risk strategy for women to place their financial security in marriage or a male partner. The treatment of footballers’ wives in the media suggests marriage is a means to achieve femininity and this can be an active choice for women in an equal world, but as working class women their dependence on men is seen as pre-feminist and invokes criticism (Negra and Holmes, 2008). Marriage to a footballer seems a precarious career choice – particularly in light of the reporting of their sexual behaviour in the tabloid press, yet the career of a wag has become a popular and aspirational one to many women. This book will seek to explain why this particular symbol of women is so popular and what it means in contemporary British society.

Certainly the spectacle of these women has captured the media and the public’s imagination in a range of ways. However, despite the popularity and celebration of these women in some areas of the media, on a closer look much of it appears to be negative and they are regularly denigrated on the basis of appearance, taste and intelligence. It seems that the wags exemplify what Tyler and Bennett (2009/2010) have described as a cynical turn in celebrity culture, where pleasure is found in contempt and envy rather than through admiration and desire, and the research for this book also found such cynicism in the representations of certain kinds of working class women.

Despite feminism providing women with opportunities to pursue their own careers and alternative lifestyles these images depict a return to a more traditional and conservative world, with women clearly placed as adjuncts to their husbands upon whom they are dependent for their income and status. The wives are shown to be conspicuous and glamorous consumers and discussed by some as if living in a fairy tale world. This fairy tale has become inspiring to some young women and it is symptomatic of a ‘wannabe’ culture where wags are prominent role models. Through analogies with fairy tales, the wives provide a moral education to young women about how to live their lives in contemporary Britain, providing cautionary tales about the ‘right’ types of femininity and behaviour to adhere to.

Although the wags are portrayed in a domestic and marital setting, they are rarely passive women and despite having symbolic capital in the eyes of some young women, in much of the printed media they are seen as a distasteful distraction to the important and masculine world of football. According to one commentator,

the sports celebrity scandal is one of contemporary life’s most contradictory morality plays, with media, sportspeople, fans and onlookers representing an ensemble cast adopting multiple and sometimes antagonistic roles.

(Rowe, 1997:206–7)

Although not always part of a scandal the wags are often viewed in a similar way. Footballers’ wives now play a major role in celebrity and football reporting. In discussing the 2006 World Cup England team selection, White claimed that it ‘seemed driven by the requirements of heat magazine’s picture desk’ and that the team was

supported by a preposterous gaggle of micro-skirted Marie Antoinettes, they were living testament to the fact that unearned fame is the most corrosive of sporting influences.

(2006:S7 Telegraph Sport)

According to Gitlin (1998:82), we ‘are not only enamoured of celebrities, but fascinated by the means by which they become and remain celebrated’. The wags prompt debates in the media around celebrity and who deserves symbolic recognition and wealth. The wives’ ubiquitous coverage has provoked envy in many who question why women who are dependent on their partners for an identity and money should obtain celebrity. Their lack of productive work leads them to be denigrated as the undeserving rich.

Using a semiotic and discourse analysis, outlined in Chapter 3, this research examines the symbol of the footballer’s wife and the discourses surrounding it, across a range of media including magazines, newspapers, television series and auto/biographies to unpack what the stereotype of the wag entails and how and why it has been generated and sustained. When this project began in 2006, it was unclear whether the term ‘wag’ would still have any resonance in popular culture or if anyone would know what it meant by the time the book was completed. Rather than the ephemeral concept that it seemed likely to be, running only for the duration of the World Cup, it has become an enduring and pervasive categorisation of a certain type of woman. As Alison Kervin, author and sports journalist, notes they are such a phenomenon that

people would probably be able to name more England wags than England cricketers. It’s just ridiculous you know certainly more wives than England female players, I could you know, because they are in the papers day after day after day after day.

(2008, personal interview)

This book will set out how the media has helped to generate a career path for a wag which women can follow. It looks at how some women have exploited their position to create a niche career for themselves as a celebrity ‘wife of’ – providing gossip and private details of the family life of professional footballers – a glamorous but hitherto largely closed world. This ‘wife of’ career provides untold opportunities for some wives and the representation of these women involves creating conflicting symbols for the audience and these will be analysed here. The book will seek to understand the paradox of these women, who on the one hand are seen as aspirational role models to young girls whilst simultaneously being denigrated as a grotesque figure invoking disgust. It will also explain how this figure has emerged through the blurring of exaggerated fictional representations and media reporting of real life wives and their lives.

Celebrities are not intimate and spontaneous as suggested in the media but are meticulously mediated constructions (Rojek, 2001). The emergence of wags as a media sensation was not created by chance reporting and is clearly bound up with a zeitgeist of a celebrity- and sport-obsessed media. It is likely they were invited to the 2006 World Cup by the FA for the first time as a calculated decision to deflect attention away from the England team following concerns over the impact of media pressure – a decision which spectacularly backfired as the wives were subsequently blamed for the team’s poor performance and deemed a distraction. It is argued that celebrity status makes it difficult for people to maintain personal relationships due to the media invasion on their private lives (Rojek, 2001). This is seen by the volume of media coverage of celebrities’ affairs and relationship breakdowns. Although such stories are regularly applied to footballers, footballers’ wives provide a paradox to the difficulties of personal relationships and celebrity as their fame is vicarious and often achieved through these very relationships.

The chapter now provides an overview of women’s historical role in football – as a sport and as a cultural pursuit. It will then set out how developments in football, the media and celebrity have combined to sustain the contemporary celebrity milieu in which footballers and their wives are such important players.

Women and football

According to Hargreaves (1994), there is a long history of male domination in modern sports. Although not sportswomen, footballers’ wives are intrinsically linked to football and provide a glamorous and feminine element to the sport without damaging its traditional patriarchal order. Even female sports players are often defined in a familial rather than sporting role. Removing the sports element relative to the woman and attaching it to a sporting male serves to support traditional biological assumptions of women in sport. Hargreaves argues that children are primarily socialised into traditional gender roles through the family and this is now underlined through media coverage of wags and footballers’ families.

Historically, women have been sidelined as peripheral to professional football. In times of need, however, women have often been called upon to boost the popularity of the game. During both World Wars a number of women took up football as the men’s leagues declined due to a lack of male players, but these were quickly marginalised once the male leagues resumed (Williams and Woodhouse, 1991). In the 1950s the Chairman of the National Federation of Football Supporters Clubs issued the statement that the ‘Federation [needs] “showmanship” … and one of the ideas put forward was the running of a National Football Queen Competition’ (National Federation AGM Minutes, 1954:9 cited in Taylor, 1992:144). This led to beauty queen pageants being set up around the country to raise the profile of clubs and the Federation. Despite the reservations of some female fans, the contests continued and as late as 1984 there was a ‘Miss Football Supporter’ event (Taylor, 1992:147,155). This highlights a thread throughout football history where women have been used to improve the profile and heighten the glamour of the game.

Today, women’s football is taken very seriously by many as a competitive sport yet women are still used to glamorise and titillate the men’s game. Some clubs still have short-skirted cheerleaders before games and popular soccer programmes parade female fans, demonstrated by Sky’s Soccer AM programme which has a ‘soccerette’ section parading female fans along a catwalk to the strains of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’. Until recently the archive on the Sky website displayed pictures of the women, including their vital statistics (football club, bust, waist and hip measurements), serving to clearly delineate female football fans from more serious male fans.¹

The media construction of the footballer’s wife can be understood as an extension of this use of women to expand audiences and raise the profile of the sport, not only among the existing audience but also to attract a new female spectator. Clayton and Harris (2004) claim that media coverage of the off-field behaviour of footballers almost exclusively sustains a male gaze, reinforcing traditional masculinities. An image is created of beautiful and aesthetically feminine wives – viewed by many players as ‘trophy wives’ (Morris, 1981; also in Clayton and Harris, 2004:322).

The lives of footballers have become a ubiquitous part of the celebrity media and therefore their wives are too. In 2008 a new virtual football game FootballSuperStars.com was released and pays as much attention to life off the pitch as it does to football itself. Not only does the game involve playing football but also buying clothes and cars, drinking in bars and according to the game’s makers ‘you could even get yourself a Wag!’ (Booker in Steele, 2008:30). It is clear that women have always been subordinated in football, except to add glamour, and footballers’ wives now appear to supplement this glamour while reinforcing the patriarchal nature of the game. The following section sets out how developments in football and the media have led to this celebrification of the game, which has enabled the media phenomenon of wags.

Football and the media

In Hare’s (1999) perceptive analysis football has become such an attractive global marketing tool that it is able to export itself. It is not limited by linguistic barriers, does not have overly complex rules and requires no expensive equipment. The simplistic nature of football has contributed to its status as the most popular global sport and it is consequently viewed as a marketing tool as much as sport. A number of societal and communication changes have made football an integral part of popular culture, which will be discussed below, and have helped transform football into the ‘ “cash cow” of the new media sport economy’ (Boyle and Haynes, 2004:4).

The introduction of television cameras and eventually satellite broadcasting at football matches saw the game being opened up to a wider audience (Sandvoss, 2003). At this time clubs had commitments to ground restructuring following the Taylor Report in 1989 and were having to meet rising wage demands from players, so they saw the income from broadcasting as essential both in terms of selling the rights to show matches and to gain loyal audiences for marketing purposes (Boyle and Haynes, 2004). The Premier League was formed in 1992 as the larger English clubs wanted to realise and consolidate their marketing potential. They brokered a massive deal for broadcasting rights with BSkyB as they felt their popularity warranted a higher proportion of broadcasting revenues than the lower leagues. This was one of the first moves towards clubs becoming marketable brands and entertainment products focusing on the importance of merchandising (Boyle and Haynes, 2004). Although football has always been commercial with a large male, working class audience it is only since the 1980s and early 1990s that it has achieved a broader more middle class and female audience.

Satellite television opened up many new markets for football both internationally and also to groups that were to some extent excluded from football on the terraces, for example, ethnic minorities and women (Walvin, 2001). However, according to some, the introduction of new audiences has been at the expense of the traditional fan. The marketisation of football introduced expensive football-related consumer goods and the cost of attending games increased rapidly throughout the early 1990s. This prohibitive pricing alongside the introduction of club membership schemes served to exclude a number of traditional working class supporters (King, 2002; Taylor, 1995). The changing atmosphere at the grounds led to arguments that football has become ‘feminised’ through safer grounds and corporatisation making it attractive to a wider, more diverse and middle class audience. As King (2002) points out, a more affluent audience will buy merchandise and products promoted by the team and its players and has led to what Taylor (1995:10) terms consumer-fans attending football rather than spectator-supporters.

This flow of money and media attention helped create sporting personalities and transformed the earning potential of players, allowing them to live celebrity lifestyles and gain fame beyond football. Celebrity and endorsements in football have a long history – even in the 1930s some players such as Dixie Dean (Everton) and Alex James (Arsenal) were considered glamorous stars with a great deal of commercial potential (Walvin, 2001). These stars however, were used to endorse a limited range of products to a small audience – unlike today where David Beckham, for example, endorses a wide range of products and is himself a globally recognised brand. It is clear that in the twenty-first century symbolic capital in football can be turned into economic value (Boyle and Haynes, 2004:73).

In 2000, Luis Figo’s contract with Real Madrid included an image rights clause licensing the club to capitalise on his commercial value – particularly in the sale of replica shirts. This set a precedent, where many player negotiations are now based as much on marketing potential as footballing prowess (Boyle and Haynes, 2004). This is particularly true of corporations such as Nike who select young and aspiring athletes for marketing projects and determine their value on marketing potential rather than competitive achievements. Such athletes become commodities and function as marketing vehicles (Cashmore, 2006). Taylor (1995) notes that from the 1990s onwards football clubs placed more emphasis on the star qualities of players, and King (2002:195) argues that since the early 1990s teenage girls have become an important part of the footballing audience, with Manchester United in particular drawing on the sexual attractiveness of their players in marketing to such an audience. These conditions have led to football becoming a marketing platform, which some women have exploited to create a career for themselves as brands in themselves, providing stories and information about their husbands’ private lives. This in turn has increased the demand for sporting celebrity, a brief overview of which now follows.

Celebrity and football

Following on from Boorstin’s (1961/1992) important work on pseudo-events, developed in Rojek’s (2001) analysis, there are three historical processes that have led to the emergence of celebrity as we know it today – the democratisation of society, the decline in religion and the commodification of everyday life. The decline in ascribed forms of power and greater equality has helped create the celebrity, as people look elsewhere for inspiration. In contemporary society celebrity is much maligned, as many who have it appear to have no discernible talent or skill. In the past celebrity and st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Framing the Wag
• 3. Methodology
• 4. Wives in Print
• 5. Fact or Fiction
• 6. Auto/biographies – Telling Tales
• 7. Conclusions – What’s in a Name?
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Data Sources
• Bibliography
• Index