I was undercover in Baden-Baden. This is the true story of England’s most notorious World Cup WAGs

It is lunchtime, and I’m standing outside a luxury spa hotel in Baden-Baden with 100 other journalists. Paparazzi are jostling for a position at the front; all of us have eyes anxiously fixed on the revolving door at the entrance, with three security guards standing by.

It is June 2006, and the world’s press have descended on Germany for the World Cup, but while the players (Beckham! Rooney! Cole! Crouch!) are holed up in a remote hotel in the Black Forest, the main event is being played out here at the Brenners Park Hotel, where the wives and girlfriends of the England team are staying.

Like thousands of other journalists, I’d been dispatched here to report on their every move. At the time, I was news and features director at Grazia – the UK’s biggest weekly glossy news and fashion magazine. My usual beat was interviewing victims of serious crime or survivors of tragic events, but the thinking was that my investigative and persuasion skills could be useful in Baden-Baden to get to the real story behind the scenes.

The wives and girlfriends of England’s 2006 World Cup team caused a media storm before social media feeds were a thing (PA)

Excitement had been building for a while; this was an age of designer logos and bags, and this group of women perfectly aligned with everything Grazia was known for at the time. If Loaded’s heroes were the players, these women were our tribe, and back at HQ, a decision was made to dub them the WAGs. Strange to think this shorthand for wives and girlfriends was hardly known before we thrust it onto the public, but here we are.

Two decades on, Baden-Baden is the antithesis of today’s quiet luxury. This was conspicuous consumption at its loudest: the It-bag; the Chloé Paddington, Balenciaga City and Louis Vuitton monogram, all designed to flaunt wealth rather than hide it. Looking back, the sheer volume of coverage devoted to a handful of women’s daily habits, restaurant visits and handbag choices seems absurd.

My brief was simple: get an exclusive scoop on the women whose every outfit could spark a buying frenzy. Where were they partying, where were they eating, what were they eating? Anything. We needed to know what boutiques they were shopping in, what they were buying, drinking and even thinking.

Remember, this was a pre-Instagram era. People relied on the paparazzi for any hint of what was happening behind the velvet rope of celebrityland. The right exclusive picture or bit of gossip could change hands for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

As millions prepare for the 2026 World Cup in North America, this period 20 years ago feels like a different age, a pivotal moment in time for British celebrity culture. Hugely marketable players like David Beckham, Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand had completed their transformation of football from a working-class sport to an entertainment juggernaut, with players now regularly fronting multimillion-pound fashion campaigns.

Remember, this was a pre-Instagram era. People relied on the paparazzi for any hint of what was happening behind the velvet rope of celebrityland

And in Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”, consumer spending was booming. It was the WAGs, a handful of ordinary working-class women – for the most part – who embodied unapologetic aspiration and captivated the public imagination. As a young female journalist myself, I found it a refreshing change from the previous obsession with old-money “It girls” and aristos. The mood was upbeat, fun, and it felt like you could make it, whoever you were.

As my flight touched down in Germany, reports came in that the local designer boutiques, from Gucci to Prada, which had ordered £200,000 of extra stock a few days earlier, had already sold out. I read about another all-night drinking session, featuring 60 bottles of pink vintage champagne totalling £25,000 at the town’s karaoke bar.

There were countless images splashed on the covers of every local magazine and newspaper of the women in oversized sunglasses and Juicy Couture tracksuits or hot pants, huge Louis Vuitton handbags swinging from skinny forearms. Every detail was snapped by the paps, from their daily jogging sessions around the city to coffee runs and spa trips, and the daily procession through town to dinner became a nightly Baden-Baden catwalk.

Readers could not get enough of them. Of course, there had been glamorous footballers’ wives and girlfriends before, but this was different. The period marked the beginning of the age of rolling celebrity news, digital photography and gossip magazines. A photographer friend of mine from Marbella who snapped Victoria and David Beckham started a bidding war for his photo, eventually selling it for over £50,000. £100,000 deals were not unusual, he tells me. “Now celebrities just document their lives themselves on their socials.”

Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy) and Victoria Beckham – arguably the leaders of the crop in Baden-Baden (Getty)

Celebrities had a symbiotic but toxic relationship with the press pack; they needed the press for visibility, and the press needed them for sales. The power lay mainly with the editors, photographers and TV producers who decided what was newsworthy and what was not, but gradually that power dynamic shifted. Astute women like Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy) learned how to manipulate the situation and began to play the press at their own game.

The result was carefully orchestrated moments such as the famous image featuring Victoria Beckham, Coleen McLoughlin, Cheryl Tweedy and others striding through Baden-Baden’s streets. Grazia ran the picture with the headline “Reservoir Wags”, and it became a defining image of the World Cup, cementing the WAGs’ place as international celebrities. Nothing about this image was a coincidence. It was carefully curated: immaculate hair, giant sunglasses, designer handbags. All of the women possessed a confidence that came with knowing they had the world’s eyes on them, and their fame meant their earnings were growing by the minute.

This period felt like a much freer time than now. You could find yourself in close proximity to celebrities that the world was chasing, whether at the Cannes Film Festival or at a party in London’s Soho. Everyone was less guarded simply because none of us was walking around with mobile phones in our pockets ready to film someone’s downtime. Apart from the paps, of course, who were easy to spot, mostly.

Celebrities had a symbiotic but toxic relationship with the press pack; they needed the press for visibility, and the press needed them for sales

And I turned this to my advantage because I could blend in. It meant, when I returned to the Brenners Park Hotel, wearing my huge oversized Dolce & Gabbana glasses, a backless top, white jeans and heels, saying I had a facial appointment at the spa inside, security simply waved me through, leaving the crowds of mainly male paparazzi gawping outside.

Minutes later, I was sitting on the outside terrace on the next table from the whole gaggle of WAGs (a WAGgle?) as they ate lunch, gossiped, sipped champagne and planned their exploits that evening. Hours later, in an evening dress and heels and accompanied by a suited photographer friend, I managed to talk my way into the restaurant where they were eating dinner and getting hilariously drunk, leaving their itemised restaurant bill on the table – mostly fish, vegetables and multiple bottles of champagne.

Andrea Thompson went undercover in order to get the biggest scoops of the media frenzy in 2006 (Supplied)

After they’d finished a great girls’ night out, similar to so many I’d had with my friends, I quickly headed to McDonald’s – the closest place with decent wifi (this was before we all had seamless connections on phones) – and sat down with my laptop to write up the story, documenting their outfits, dancing and drinking for publication.

Looking back, there was so much that was problematic with the way the press machine worked then. The intrusion, the contempt for women perceived to be “on the make” or without class, and the underlying misogyny that was ever-present within popular culture at the time.

The women we were pursuing generated enormous public interest and money, while often being dismissed as frivolous and good for nothing. But, in reality, they sold millions of copies of magazines and newspapers. Their fashion choices could make or break fortunes in the fashion industry.

But this was also a cruel age. People rarely heard or cared about anything they had to say. Celebrity magazines routinely published body rankings and devoted countless columns to the phenomenon of the “thigh gap” and “size zero”.

Outside of women’s magazines, the WAGs were portrayed as fickle, shallow, stupid and responsible for distracting the players and costing England the tournament (they were knocked out in the quarter-final on penalties, of course). It cheers me to see now that many of these women have gone on to have highly successful million-pound businesses and lucrative careers, making them independent brands in their own right, while many of their partners have faded into the background.

But maybe this isn’t so strange. If you ask people what they remember from Germany 2006, many will recall not what happened on the field but the WAG phenomenon and a warm sense of nostalgia. There was plenty wrong with the media landscape in 2006 and I’m not pretending otherwise. It was horribly elitist and deeply sexist, for a start. But, for many of us it was also a time before social media, constant digital connection, AI and carefully curated social media images. It somehow feels like a lighter, simpler time.

Andrea Thompson is a journalist, broadcaster and former editor-in-chief of Marie Claire UK