At the US Open tennis match on a warm night in September, a packed crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium watched American Francis Tiafoe and Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov hustle back and forth across the court, putting on a show worthy of the elite stage they were on.
But in the stands, all eyes were on someone else.
From her perch in a club suite box, Morgan Riddle was magnetic. Wearing a white lace minidress, sky-high heels, and a pair of round sunglasses, she stood in the left corner of the box, breezily chatting with a friend and occasionally taking sips from the venue’s signature cocktail, a Honey Deuce. At one point she fixed a stare at the match and popped her glasses down with her fingers, with a sultry yet inquisitive expression on her face. Somewhere below, a Getty photographer snapped a photo.
Within minutes the official US Open social accounts posted the photo of Riddle to their millions of followers, with a cheeky tweet overlaid just under her expression. It would go on to be liked more than 40,000 times, be reposted several times online, and become a meme during the tournament.
In the box a collective whoop rang out when people began to see the post, with women running over to Riddle to show her. Riddle smiled. She was locked in, her expression not unlike that of an athlete when they make a big play. Then she picked up her phone and headed back inside. She wasn’t at the game to relax. She was there to work.
Riddle is not a tennis player. Until quite recently she had never even attempted to play and is, by her own admission, not very good at the sport (though she’s taking lessons). But at this year’s US Open, and every single other major tournament over the past several months, Riddle has been among the most in-demand talent with both tennis fans and sponsors. That night she was hosting a private event in partnership with vodka maker Grey Goose, and it was just one of many events on her packed schedule during the week of the Open. She hosted an event with Fenty Beauty and spoke on a panel about the intersection of fashion and tennis. She had sponsorship deals and attended fashion shows.
And, of course, she attended the matches of her boyfriend, the US number-one ranked male player Taylor Fritz. Because Riddle didn’t become, as The New York Times put it last year, “the most famous woman in men’s tennis” by playing. She did so because of her relationship. She is tennis’s most famous WAG—the acronym stands for “wives and girlfriends” of professional athletes.
“My mission has always been to bring more eyes to the sport,” Riddle tells me over breakfast on another day while she’s in town for the Open.
Dressed in a pair of trousers, slingback heels, and a fitted cardigan, Riddle is poised and direct, speaking and looking every bit like an entrepreneur who intimately knows her market. Riddle, 27, began posting about her life as a partner to a professional tennis player two years ago and since then has amassed more than a million followers across platforms, built a lucrative content-creation business replete with sponsorship deals with brands like Athleta and Dick’s Sporting Goods, and hosted a fashion-themed broadcast at Wimbledon. She’s even expanded into other sports, hosting events at Formula 1 this past summer.
In doing so, Riddle has made being a significant other to a tennis star into something new. She’s made it into a career.
“Six months after I started posting, I said to my boyfriend’s coach’s wife that my goal is to get the WAGs dressed by brands, because that had never been done before,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘I just want to get brands to pay us because we’re on these screens, we’re on ESPN, there’s so many eyes on us. Why are brands not jumping on this?’”
Welcome to WAG World. In 2024 the most influential figures in American sports aren’t the players. They are the women by their sides.
In every sport popular among Americans today, WAGs are ever present. They’re going viral, building brands, and becoming famous. They’re raising not just their own profiles, but that of their athletes. They’re collectively changing the demographics of who watches games, turning sidelines into catwalks, and gracing the pages of glossy magazines—with or without their partners. They’re changing the face of American professional sports as we know it.
Think of all the WAGs who have reached stratospheric levels of fame in just the past few years. Brittany Mahomes and Kylie Kelce are household names. Hundreds of thousands of followers obsessively track the game-day fashion of Claire Kittle (wife of San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle), Chariah Gordon (fiancée of Kansas City chiefs wide receiver Mecole Hardman Jr.), and Alisah Chanel (wife of Dallas Mavericks forward P.J. Washington). Kristin Juszczyk, the wife of San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk, went viral—and then got an NFL contract—for designing her own WAG-centric merch.
Then there are the celebrities in their WAG era: Olivia Culpo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jordyn Woods, and Sophia Bush are all dating athletes, and so are mega-influencers like Alix Earle. In fact, influencers and athletes seem to be a particular match made in heaven, with several of those pairings—Sydney Warner and San Francisco 49ers linebacker Fred Warner, Hannah Ann Sluss and NFL free agent Jake Funke, Paige Lorenze and tennis player Tommy Paul, and Emma MacDonald and Boston Celtics guard Payton Pritchard—finding love while simultaneously boosting each other’s fame both on- and offline.
Of course, there’s the biggest example of all. The league of America’s most popular sport, football, is now the home of its most famous WAG, Taylor Swift. Since Swift began dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in September 2023, the league has seen an explosive growth in fandom among women, who are engaging with the NFL and its content as never before. On Instagram, a spokesperson for the NFL tells me, the league grew its following among women by 21% in the past year, and women accounted for almost half of the NFL’s new social media followers overall. The fervor has also translated to ticket sales. A spokesperson for StubHub tells me that in the 24 hours after Swift first appeared at a Chiefs game, the platform saw the team’s ticket sales triple. Since then, the Chiefs have become the 10th best-selling team in the NFL (up from 2013 pre-Swift) and the second best-selling team on the road.
Data from Nielsen shows that the Chief’s games saw a more than 50% increase in viewership among teenage girls, and all over the country, women are tuning in to see Swift. Her game-day outfits are anticipated with rapid fervor and then dissected with precision. Cameras swing to her throughout the games, her reaction shots go viral. Sports journalists began writing trend pieces on “NFL dads” and “Swiftie daughters,” who (apparently) finally had a way to bond. But in the semi-aggravating implications of that claim lie an interesting truth: Swift was opening up football to a whole new fandom by infusing a mixture of pop culture, fashion, and lifestyle content into the game.
And the NFL, for one, is thrilled.
“If you think about just the overall growth of the game and engagement…that’s such a great recipe for us,” Ian Trombetta, the league’s SVP of social, influencer and content marketing, tells me, speaking not just about Swift but about all the NFL WAGs now adored by millions.
It’s not just Swift, though, and it’s not just football. Since 2020 the popularity of WAGs among the American public has exploded. Following in the footsteps of their original early ’00s British counterparts like Victoria Beckham and Coleen Rooney (more on them soon), WAGs have taken what was often treated as a somewhat tacky or maligned identity and leveraged it, along with social media, to build their brands. Their numbers are wide and varied. A woman doesn’t need to have any prior level of notoriety to become an influential WAG; in fact, many don’t. They’re rising up in every sport, from football to tennis to basketball, baseball, and hockey. And while some of the most well-known WAGs are partnered to an athlete who is particularly prominent, many are married to athletes who were not necessarily household names before their wives hit it big.
The rise of the WAG is also not a phenomenon that Swift is responsible for, though since she joined their ranks it has undoubtedly reached a crescendo. In fact, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that had the most impact on creating WAG World as it is today. Stuck in their homes and stuck with their partners, WAGs turned to TikTok and Instagram, and were somewhat surprised to find that people were fascinated by their domestic lives.
Allison Kucharczyk certainly was surprised. When the pandemic began she started posting random videos of her life with her now-husband, NFL free agent Isaac Rochell, on TikTok, a platform she had been interested in but hadn’t had time to truly dive into.
“Everything was shut down and I was like, Okay, perfect,” Kucharczyk, now 29, tells me. “This is my opportunity to start doing a passion project, which would be just filming day-to-day stuff, talking about my husband being in the NFL.”
Kucharczyk is now one of the most famous WAG influencers online, with nearly 4 million followers across platforms. Through her content, her followers see a side of being the wife of a professional athlete many have never thought about. For example, when Rochell was cut from the Cleveland Browns in 2022.
“I just came on social media, clearly emotional, just talking about, ‘Yes, I understand that being in the NFL is a really cool thing, but there are also other sides,’” she says. “This is still my life. Yes, he makes a great living, incomewise, but that doesn’t negate my feelings when my husband loses his job. And I think people then were able to see, ‘Okay, she’s peeling back certain layers that we’ve never seen before.’”
Why are WAGs front and center right now? After all, it’s not as if athletes haven’t had partners for years, and some of them were and are very famous. But these WAGs tended to fall into one of two categories: Either they were celebrities themselves before partnering with their athlete (Ciara and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Russell Wilson, Hilary Duff and hockey player Mike Comrie, Carrie Underwood and hockey player Mike Fisher), their athlete was one of the most famous athletes in their sport (Ayesha Curry and Stephen Curry, Elin Nordegren and Tiger Woods, Savannah James and Lebron James), or both (Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady, Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez).
Until very recently, the term WAG was mostly used as a pejorative by the tabloid press. Women who dated professional athletes were often thought of as bimbos, arm candy, or gold diggers. They were either disrespected or ignored. They certainly had no organic platform of their own.
In the old days there was no opportunity to build one, and fans often couldn’t view WAGs with nuance or without stereotypes. Kelly Stafford was in her early 20s when her college boyfriend, Matthew Stafford, was drafted in 2009 to the Detroit Lions. Immediately, she says, she faced a torrent of media and online abuse. People picked her apart, commenting on her appearance and even criticizing the boob job she had gotten as a teenager.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, what the first couple years as his significant other were like,” she tells me now.
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The last thing on her mind would have been to try to build something for herself. If anything, she said, she wanted to be invisible, to get rid of any notion that she was somehow leeching off her now-husband’s talent and fame.
“For a really long time I did not want to take advantage of any platform I was given due to being married to my husband,” she says. “I felt like it wasn’t my place. I felt almost dirty doing that.”
Now a mother of four daughters and in her 15th season as an NFL WAG, Stafford has watched the tide turn dramatically.
“Women [now have] businesses and have this huge platform,” she says. “It is incredible to watch.”
The biggest change? Social media. WAGs have always had a unique perspective to share and unequivocally interesting things to talk about. It’s something that most sports fans probably don’t think about, but being the wife or even girlfriend of a professional athlete is an experience very few understand.
A WAG must, essentially, go where her partner goes. That means leaving her hometown or wherever she would choose to live to go to a strange city she didn’t choose. Most live approximately half the year where their athlete plays, and then move their entire life somewhere else for the offseason. Many spend countless long nights and weeks alone—raising their kids, taking care of their house—while their partner travels for games or training camps. Most have had to move abruptly, without warning, across the country on a dime after their partner is traded, and spend nail-biting weeks waiting to see if their partner will be cut from the team. Some have become very wealthy very fast; some are middle class.
Their lifestyle is so transient that most women are unable to work outside the home in any permanent capacity, which for many makes the comments about being gold diggers sting a little bit sharper. It’s simultaneously a thrilling life and a frustrating one. One filled with decadence but also sacrifice. One that can be empowering and exciting, but can also feel regressive. Most WAGs are college-educated, many are former athletes themselves, and all have in one way or another put their own dreams on hold to follow the dream of their partner.
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What social media did for WAGs was open a door. It gave them a platform to share their exciting, glamorous, frustrating, and altogether unique lives with the masses, and show a completely different side to one of the biggest cultural phenomenons in American life. And they struck gold. Now being a WAG can be a brand. It can be a business. It can make you rich.
“I have a whole career,” Chanen Johnson, a content creator and the wife of New Orleans tight end Juwan Johnson, tells me. “I don’t want to belittle Juwan. He’s amazing and he does an amazing job in his football career. But I was making more money than him until he got his new contract. So if people are going to say I’m a gold digger, that’s fine, go ahead.”
Like Kucharczyk, Johnson started posting on TikTok in the early days of COVID, and her platform exploded (she has nearly 4 million followers on all platforms). A former elite gymnast, Johnson met her husband when they were both student athletes at Pennsylvania State University, and she dove straight into WAG life soon after graduation.
Now, she says, she not only has her own career, but her family has built a business that they can continue after her husband’s playing career comes to its inevitable end.
“When he’s done, we’re moving where I want to move,” she says. “He’s going to be the stay-at-home dad while I go pursue my life. There’s opportunities that we’ve had to put on the back burner, and they’re like dream opportunities…. I’m open to whatever keeps coming my way. It’s been a wild ride.”
In its current iteration, WAG World has its flaws. It’s almost unbearably regressive in its near-uniform heterogeneity. Nearly every single famous WAG is a woman romantically involved with a man, and almost all of them fit conventional beauty standards. There are more white WAGs who have become famous than WAGs of color, a trend that likely reflects problematic racial disparities in the influencer industry at large.
WAGs are in many ways a pretty uncomfortable mirror into American sports culture. There are way more famous male athletes than women athletes, and most male athletes have more eyes on them than female athletes, leading to similar visibility for their partners over the partners of women in sports.
There are notable exceptions. Many famous women in sports—Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Olivia Dunne—are themselves married or dating pro athletes and serve a WAG role (we are calling these couples Doubles Partners). And the ranks of LGBTQ+ WAGs are growing. Author Glennon Doyle is a WAG (she’s married to former US women’s soccer star Abby Wombach), as is the aforementioned actor Sophia Bush, who is also dating a retired soccer star, Ashlyn Harris.
And with the rise of basketball superstar Caitlin Clark, we also have witnessed the birth of one of the very first true HABs (husbands and boyfriends, naturally): her boyfriend, Conner McCaffery. Like many WAGs, McCaffery was a college athlete who didn’t go pro and wasn’t a household name before his girlfriend’s career exploded. Now he is regularly covered as a celebrity in several publications (like this very one) and tabloids.
The fact that WAGs and women’s sports are growing in popularity at relatively the same time could make for a symbiotic relationship. As more women become somewhat accidental sports fans through watching WAGs, they could become more interested in playing sports themselves, further growing women’s sports and thus creating more HABs, LGBTQ+ WAGs, and overall equality.
In fact, that’s a scenario the NFL’s Trombetta is most excited about. He has a dream: turning all those little Swifties into future Olympic flag football players.
“If Taylor’s helping with some of the interest around football in general to get more girls playing flag football in particular, that is nothing but terrific for us,” he says.
It’s clear that WAGs are taking over, and we’re just as fascinated as everyone else in this phenomenon. So during the course of the next five days, it’s WAG Week. Check back every day to explore how the wives and girlfriends of pro athletes are changing the face of American sports as we know it. We’ll bring you interviews with established WAGS. We’ll take you into the private club suite where the Chiefs’ wives (arguably the coolest girls in the NFL) cheer on their men. We’ll chart a complete history of the WAG from the UK to the US. We’ll bring you beauty and style tips for your own WAG era, and more. Well also have fun WAG content across our social channels, so be sure to keep up with us there too.
It’s a WAG, WAG, WAG world, and we’re just living in it.
Lead image credits:
Emma MacDonald: Chase McCann
Ayan Broomfield: Riley Taylor
Kennedy Frazer: Courtesy of subject
Hannah Ann Sluss: Courtesy of subject
Hannah Zappe: Courtesy of subject
Chanen Johnson: Lucas Barrios
Sydney Warner: Victoria Kurkina, IG handle: @vikuiam
Sheawna Weathersby: Terence Greene/Greene Special Media @greene_special_media
Remaining Images: Getty Images
