It's Cool To Be A WAG Again

I can’t stop watching a 21-second video about hands — Travis Kelce’s hands, specifically. His hands have helped the Kansas City Chiefs tight end score 75 touchdowns and win the Super Bowl twice. But the video all over my timeline is more concerned with how his hands touched Taylor Swift as they got out of a car, in full view of New York City paparazzi, after both made surprise cameos at Saturday Night Live this past weekend. “He gently had his palm on her stomach to keep her close to him… she must feel so safe around him,” posted one fan account. “No you guys don’t even get it. The waist grab. THE WAIST GRAB,” gushed another.

It was the latest in a string of carefully stage-managed moments, which kicked off last month when Swift showed up in the VIP box of a Chiefs-Bears game amid rumors that she and Kelce were dating. The frenzied reaction from Swifties, NFL fans, and the media reminded me of the spectacle around David Beckham and Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham’s early courtship, as revisited in the new Netflix docuseries Beckham: a sports hero and a pop megastar, coming together to create something even bigger — to give us a show. Now on a break from her juggernaut Eras Tour, Swift is signaling that we’re in a very different era ourselves, one in which being a WAG is officially cool again.

It sounds ridiculous to call Swift a WAG — a British tabloid term for “wives and girlfriends” of famous athletes, usually soccer players — because she’s one of the most famous women in the world. So famous that the adjectives we used to describe most celebrities don’t do her justice. But Swift tends to be seen in public only when she wants to be, and she spent most of the last six years in an extremely private relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. So when she shows up in a red Chiefs jersey to cheer Kelce on and hang out with his mom, it’s clear she’s happy to perform the role. It’s not just Swift who is embracing being a WAG, either: Morgan Riddle, girlfriend of U.S. tennis star Taylor Fritz, recently reclaimed the term in an interview with the New York Times, which described her as “the most famous woman in men’s tennis.” Riddle’s paparazzi-courting courtside looks and winking social media persona (her Instagram bio reads “not cool but my outfits are”) have turned her into a bona fide It Girl.

When WAG first became A Thing™ in the early 2000s in the United Kingdom, it wasn’t exactly a compliment. Just look at Footballers’ Wives, a hilariously low budget TV drama that ran from 2002 to 2006 and featured characters with names like Chardonnay who chain-smoked in garish headpieces and exaggerated lip liner. Media coverage of the real-life women fixated on a certain coded trashiness — like falling out of nightclubs — even when the WAGs were already famous in their own right. The 2006 World Cup in Germany, where Victoria Beckham was joined by a squad that included Girls Aloud superstar Cheryl (then-fiancée of former Chelsea player Ashley Cole), was a tabloid event on par with Paris, Lindsay, and Britney’s “Bimbo Summit.” The tabloid press went into a frenzy as the group reportedly danced on tabletops and racked up huge bar bills; the England team manager at the time was reportedly peeved about the press attention the women received. Some pundits even blamed England’s loss on the WAG “circus” for eclipsing the athletes.

Even when Victoria was in support mode on the sidelines, she was helping steer the Beckham brand toward something resembling royalty.

Despite the often reductive way they’re characterized in the press, WAG life can be a path to wielding cultural power, not unlike the once-misunderstood profession of being an influencer. Just look at the messy, highly publicized court battle between elite WAG Coleen Rooney (wife of retired England legend Wayne) and Rebekah Vardy (wife of Leicester City striker Jamie). In a nutshell: Rooney accused Vardy of selling stories about her to a tabloid after resorting to some, uh, unconventional detective methods to try to catch her. In response, Vardy sued Rooney for libel, and the memeified saga — dubbed “Wagatha Christie” — went all the way to London’s High Court, where the women cat-walked in and out clutching handbags that cost more than your rent.

After winning the trial, a vindicated Rooney landed the coveted September cover of British Vogue (with the cover line “Wife, mother, detective, superstar”). She has been a mainstay in the British tabloid press for 20 years, ever since she started dating her husband at age 16. But a Vogue cover? That’s a status she didn’t have before — and continues to enjoy. She’s the subject of Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, a three-part docu-series streaming on Disney+ (in the United Kingdom) and Hulu (in the United States), and next month, she’ll release her memoir, My Account. Rooney has used fascination around WAGs as an opportunity to reinvent herself beyond the archetype.

That is something Posh and Becks know a little about. After the Spice Girls went on hiatus in the 2000s, Victoria remained one of its most visible members and later rebranded as a fashion designer, while David cemented himself as one of the sport’s most bankable icons. Beckham juxtaposes their buzzy early courtship with the acceleration of his endorsement deals and brand campaigns. Even when Victoria was in support mode on the sidelines, she was helping steer the Beckham brand toward something resembling royalty: After their wedding, where they literally sat on gold thrones, the couple lived in a mansion the press nicknamed — what else — “Beckingham Palace.”

Being a WAG, in short, is work. So when Taylor Swift is feeding our For You pages by shouting “Let’s f*cking go!” in the stadium box, “she’s not making an album,” as writer Anne Helen Petersen put it on Substack, “but she is making gossip art” — the kind she has greatly benefitted from in her career, and still stands to. When Morgan Riddle is posting fashion #content in Barbiecore courtside glam or uploading behind-the-scenes YouTube explainers, she is being an ambassador — or a “gateway drug,” as the Times put it — to tennis. Is any of this all that different from Julia Fox, who learned to launch a thousand blog posts by transforming herself into a daring downtown fashionista, or Paris Hilton, who built an empire by leaning into her airhead heiress persona? If being a WAG is a badge of pride, it’s only because we know now what the tabloids didn’t back then: Playing a character is a job — even what that character is yourself.