The most revealing thing about WAG coverage isn’t the women being covered. I’ve been thinking about this since Georgina Rodriguez showed up in Miami and half the internet started debating whether her beach Instagram stories were “appropriate” timing before a Portugal knockout match. The discourse was less about Georgina and more about what people need her to be — which is something much smaller than what she actually is.
“WAG” entered the common lexicon during the 2006 World Cup — Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole, Baden-Baden hotel bars, the press treating it all as a subplot — though the term itself was already circulating before that. The label organized the world into legible roles. Players play. WAGs watch. The problem is that three of the most visible women at this tournament haven’t been playing that role for years, and two of them arguably never did.
Georgina Rodriguez has nearly 73 million Instagram followers — more than most players at this World Cup, including several starters. She launched Mimoa, her own loungewear brand, on June 30, ten days into Portugal’s knockout run. Twenty-seven pieces, burgundy to pink, leggings and sports bras and hoodies. The brand statement: “I created Mimoa with the belief that a woman’s body isn’t something to be fixed. It’s alive, it’s enough, it’s beautiful.” She was posting beach dance stories in Mimoa athletic wear, tagging @mimoa, using the audience she’d built alongside Ronaldo’s career to launch something entirely her own. That’s not a WAG move. That’s a founder using a cultural moment.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DaHSHYfEQwV/
Then there’s the Argentine thing. Georgina, who is herself Argentine, said publicly: “People forget I’m Argentine, so of course my heart is always with Argentina first. That will never change, no matter what.” She said this while her fiancé was actively trying to eliminate Argentina from the same tournament.
https://x.com/markklfc/status/2067290593277985198
The WAG frame requires loyalty to run through the player. Georgina’s loyalty runs through her own identity. The fact that the story got treated as a charming contradiction — rather than a coherent, autonomous position — says something about the frame’s limits.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaJVPl5qR2w/
Ashlyn Castro’s situation is different and more instructive. She had a career before she was publicly connected to Jude Bellingham — Clarins brand partnerships, a DJ Khaled music video in 2021, a fashion and beauty presence built on its own terms. When she kissed Bellingham in Dallas after England’s opening win over Croatia, it was the first time a lot of American sports fans learned her name. For a significant portion of her 700K existing followers, that moment was new information arriving on top of something already established. Ashlyn Castro’s profile tells a different story than the tabloid version: a woman whose career preceded the relationship, whose Instagram has stayed focused on fashion and beauty, not match updates or Bellingham’s tournament.
Antonela Roccuzzo has been doing this for roughly fifteen years. She and Messi are from the same neighborhood in Rosario — childhood sweethearts, not people who met when he was already famous. She’s been at World Cups since at least 2010. After Messi’s hat-trick against Algeria broke Klose’s all-time goals record, she posted: “Qué privilegio verte hacer historia una y otra vez. Te amo.” That’s it. No brand tie-in, no caption thread. Antonela has always shown up, posted, shared just enough — and somehow nearly 40 million people find that sufficient. The machinery has never quite known what to do with her reticence.
What the WAG framework cannot process is this: during the tournament, Georgina sent Antonela a Mimoa gift package — black outfit, pink water bottle, tote bag — across rival-team lines. Antonela posted it on her Stories: “Thank you so much @georginagio. Everything is beautiful. Wishing you all the success in the world.” Two women on opposite sides of a World Cup bracket, building something that has nothing to do with what happens on the pitch, using the WAG media economy for something it wasn’t designed for. The framework requires them to be defined by their partners. They are clearly defining something else.
The fair counterargument is that the attention is still downstream of the relationships — that Georgina’s 73 million and Antonela’s 40 million exist in part because of who they’re with. That’s probably true. What I’m less certain about is whether it matters as much as the coverage implies. Plenty of people build audiences through associations they didn’t choose, then do real things with them. Three women at the same tournament, each operating by different logic, none of them doing what the label says they should be doing. I’m not sure the label survives contact with all three of them at once.
