The game’s gone. It’s a phrase that flits around the edges of modern football, largely uttered by those already retired with an air of resentment for what they perceive is being done to the game that they love so much. As if they hold the only claim to it.
Gone are days of the the ‘pull your socks up’, held-together-with-a-boot-lace attitude of English football in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The modern footballer is instead well groomed and perfectly manicured, eats meals that look like something out of a bush-tucker trial in the pursuit of some nutritional edge, and arrives on gameday dripping in labels from more nations than most people will ever visit.
Entire football clubs are now owned by Hollywood megastars, production companies stage promo events at Premier League games, and certain clubs will churn out enough limited edition kits to put on an exhibition at the V&A museum.
Is that a bad thing? You can make your own minds up about that, but you can’t deny that opening football up to new worlds – fashion, showbiz, glamour – has made it something more than just 90 minutes on a Sunday. It is now one of the greatest entertainment industries in the world.
In recent years, documentaries have proven a well-trodden, and well-loved, method of peeling back this increasingly bejewelled, couture curtain, and Amazon’s latest venture, Married To The Game, provides an entertaining and important look at some of the characters in this global production that we often overlook: The wives and girlfriends.
Amazon’s latest documentary, Married To The Game, provides an entertaining look at the wives and girlfriends of top-level footballers
The series follows the lives of five subjects, including Samantha Tarkowski, across six episodes
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The tagline that emerges early in the series’ trailer is quick to set the tone: ‘Behind every great footballer is an even greater woman’.
Married To The Game challenges the ingrained conceptions of what it means to be the partner of a footballer – limitless spending, unutterable glamour, wedding courtesy of a fat check from Hello! which were crystallised in the early 2000s – even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Sara Gundogan, Cat Harding, Ash Turner, Samantha Tarkowski and Taylor Ward all guide viewers through the trials and tribulations that their lives as members of this elite world offer up – all while avoiding the dreaded term ‘WAG’.
While tabloid frenzy for covering footballers’ partners may have died down from the days of Coleen Rooney and Victoria Beckham, Instagram and the rise of the influencer has likely only made those on the outside more sceptical. How relatable can we expect those posting from Ibiza, Wembley, or a Balenciaga boutique to be?
Sure, the challenges that they face might not be the sort of everyday concerns that we have, but then again the escapism we seek wouldn’t exactly be effective if we stepped into a mirror image of our own lives, would it?
But that does not make them any less important. These are still women looking to assert their own stamp on a world in which they are very much regarded as the accessory to their partners’ successes, and that pursuit is something that perhaps most of us can empathise with. Granted, not many of us are married to a Champions League winner, but the principle remains.
That is one of the key emotions taken from the project – empathy. It seems at times we are quicker to judge than to love, more prone to cynicism than romance and acceptance, and in this way Married To The Game challenges viewers to listen and observe rather than rest on their preconceptions.
James Tarkowski’s flirting with wife Sarah – seen in a recent promotional tweet from Amazon – is both endearing and jaw-clenchingly awkward, which bring an endearing realism to their relationship. The Everton stalwart might be about as close as you get to an old-school, rugged, tough-as-boot-leather centre half these days, but his chat-up lines show that off the pitch he’s just as cringey as the rest of us.
Taylor Ward learns her partner Riyad Mahrez had been sold to Saudi club Al-Ahli last summer in a raw and incredibly personal moment
Ward (left) was shocked in the first episode by the revelation that her fiancee Mahrez had signed for Al-Ahli
Ash Turner – who is married to Nottingham Forest ‘keeper Matt – is another who features in the show
Scenes like the recently viral moment Ward learns her partner Riyad Mahrez must move to Saudi Arabia prove heart-breaking, the Instagram filter briefly airbrushed out of this idyllic utopia as the viewer gains access to an incredibly raw and personal experience for young woman worried about the future of their family.
The former Man City star’s blunt rejoinder that moving is ‘just part of the game’, which Ward herself was keen to brush aside when she attributed his apparent coldness to his being French to Mail Sport, reassures viewers that it is not all red carpets and diamond rings.
That’s not to say that the pre-requisite acres of designer handbags and marbled mansions are not given pride of place. Let’s face it, that’s one of the main reasons that we are so fascinated with this world after all. And sure, there are moments that underline just how inaccessible the plane of megastardom can be, a subtle reminder of the showbiz world that football now inhabits.
Yet Married To The Game manages to stay true to its core intentions; it isn’t just afternoons spent shopping and socialising, but a true documentary that offers compelling narratives on topics such as body image, the trials of motherhood, and the challenges of living thousands of miles from family, friends and loved ones.
Statements like this can ring hollow to a cynic, but they remain ones their speakers feel the need to stress and restress to a society still partially traumatised by a mid-2000s ‘WAG’-obsessed media landscape, quick to cram them into an identikit stereotype.
Take football out of the equation, and there is still a well-constructed, intriguing documentary, the five impressively varying lives of these subjects played out against one another to create a well-crafted tableau of what life is like from within the inner circle.
Married to the Game’s intentions to cut through the expected and reveal the realities – good and bad – of the lives of its subjects , which are brought into sharp focus in its early offerings.
Catherine Harding, girlfriend of Arsenal and Italy star Jorginho, is another of the docuseries’ subjects
James Tarkowski has received praise and cringes for his chat-up line to wife Samantha in the new show
There are still the frills, colours and extravagance that you might expect in a look behind such a glitzy curtain
Yet well-executed and embracing as it is, the series itself is a reminder that football is no longer just a game, but a cinematic universe, Married To The Game now one of a number of spin-off series that look to maximise content exposure, entertaining and enlightening or otherwise.
The cynic might suggest that this is a growing trend in a game that is increasingly ceding ground to the glamourous tendrils of show-business and the glitz of Hollywood.
Others might wearily swat aside those claims, instead insisting that it is merely a good watch, shedding light on some of the stories in the game that are worth telling, but sadly find themselves outshone by those closest to them.
Married To The Game, launches in the UK on Prime Video on Friday 23rd February.