"Jamelia" Categorisation
Undoubtedly the "WAG" image of shopping and clubbing, as portrayed in the press in 2006, tended to stick. This led some WAGs, such as Girls Aloud member Cheryl Cole, to reject the eponym and to emphasise their credentials as career women in their own right.
The singer Jamelia (whose footballer boyfriend, Darren Byfield of Bristol City, played for Jamaica, which failed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup) drew a distinction between, on the one hand, those WAGs, such as Victoria Beckham, who are "businesswoman", and Cole and Rooney, who "have a job", and, on the other, those who, in her view, had the wrong "priorities" and simply spent their boyfriends' money. This categorisation had some similarities both with Lisa Armstrong's comparison of supermodels with WAGs and with the suggested "WAG"/"footballers' wife" distinction. Indeed it is possible to argue that, over the two-month period of 2006 that the WAGs were in the public spotlight, a subtle distinction emerged between "WAG" as a general acronym and the increasingly used "Wag" in the colloquial sense of a "footballer's wife".
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