Why we worship the Wimbledon Wags

Spectator

11-07-2025

Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2022 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of course, when most people summon core Wags to mind, they think of the glorious bitchiness of the football Wags in their 2006 Baden-Baden Euro glory – all fake tan, Ugg boots, hair and sunglasses like Barbies on speed. Sadly, they don't make them like that anymore. These days, Wags don't need the papers to pap them; they are Instagram celebrities before they have even got the GHD hair straighteners out – they're not trying as hard.
But I'm not here for the football Wags. I'm here for the tennis Wags and, in Wimbledon fortnight, they are here for me. The Wimbledon Wags are winking at the camera from the players' box, their faces pained by every break point, their posture guarded as the coach leans over to whisper something, sometimes their expressions are unknowable behind the Ray-Bans. To me, they are a study in a kind of courtly femininity that we rarely see anymore – a masterclass in presumed reverence, poise and, crucially, silence. Tennis, with its highly intense, individualistic psychological makeup, invites this pose as no other sport can.
More than anything, I think it is their silence that invests them with such power, since we can only ever ventriloquise their thoughts. Symbolically raised above the arena where their paramour jousts, they are the subject of deep scrutiny. I'm not sure how many times the BBC cameras pan towards them during the course of any one match, but the dyad between player and Wag is clearly of enormous fascination to the commentators and, I might add, to me, the viewer. Commentators like McEnroe and Henman point the Wags out dutifully – 'and there of course is so and so' – but naturally, the brilliantly priapic Becker was the greatest at the tennis Wags, often opining on them with fabulous sexism, famously starting a row in 2021 after calling quarter-finalist Marton Fucsovics's Wag 'very pretty'.
Not all tennis Wags are the same. Back in the Fab Four heyday of Djokovic, Federer and Nadal, they knew the drill and had no social media to feed or augment their position. Think Federer's lovely, bosomy wife Mirka, who sat and watched with the greatest decorum, giving very little away even at match points and getting to her feet only for the win. Eventually, Mirka became – as all tennis Wags do – a study in maternity, bringing any one of their four immaculate children into the players' box as a symbol of Federer's all-round family man status and virility. Sometimes, the tennis Wag finds it hard to maintain composure, a trait that is almost always cast in terms of nationality. Djokovic's wife, Jelena – known to the crowd as a fiery, fiercely devoted Iron Curtain Serb – performs expressions of such pain and anguish that one feels that the stage could have been her true calling.
This year, the media has gone wild for the presumed romance between Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu
But the tennis Wags do have a stage and use it to its full advantage. Once in a decade, to the unadulterated delight of the media, the crowd and the BBC, a unicorn Wag appears. A unicorn Wag is both courtly lady of the players' box come to watch her man in combat, and a professional tennis player herself.
This year, the media has gone wild for the presumed romance between Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu. Most accounts of this union draw on fictional, sexed-up castings of tennis in films like Challengers or the spectacularly awful Wimbledon starring Paul Bettany, inviting us to consider the steamy underside of the professional tour. But I think that the unicorn Wag delights – and disturbs – because she offers a study in multiple selves. Look at Steffi Graf cheering on husband Andre Agassi or Chrissie Evert championing Jimmy Connors back in his heyday – women with the ability to be both reverent and aggressive all at once. Watch Agassi look up to his players' box and silently commune with Steffi over a missed break point or bungled smash and you will see a highly coded gaze that takes in romance and strategy like no other.
But which two lucky tennis Wags will sit in the box on Sunday? For maximum dramatic pietà, I am hoping that it will be Jelena Djokovic and unicorn Wag Raducanu poised to cheer on Alcaraz. One always hopes that they might turn on each other, Wagatha Christie-style, in the heat of the match with only the Ray-Bans as weapons – but of course they don't. These are tennis Wags, after all. They stand elevated, heads bowed, willing their men to victory.