Actress, singer and former footballer’s wife Michelle Gayle is on a mission to prove there’s more to life than being a WAG. Emma Pinch reports

SHOES by Louboutin. Hermes bags. A wardrobe from Cricket. What’s to hate about being a WAG?

Quite a lot, according to actress and former footy wife Michelle Gayle.

She’s running workshops for wannabe WAGs on how to aspire to be something more than just a decorative appendage on a Premiership player’s arm.

“I wanted to use my experiences to show that the reality of being a WAG is not as easy as people think it is,” she explains. “People think all they do is sit about and shop.

“ I’m not saying people don’t sit down and shop but there are lots more complexities to it. It can be hard.”

Michelle’s mission is to get teenage wannabe WAGs stuck into reading and learning rather than hoping for a footballer to kick-start their career.

To that end she’s written a novel to be released in mobile phone texts called Pride & Premiership, with chapters co-written by young women.

It tells the story of two 17-year-olds who bag their prize – with very different outcomes.

It all started when Michelle learned from a fellow TV panellist that snaring a footballer accounted for the career plans of 70 per cent of teenage girls.

“They weren’t just saying it to their mates, it was a career plan,” she says incredulously. “But then when I put myself in their shoes it made perfect sense to want to be a WAG.

“We’re all brought up with Cinderella stories where a prince whisks you off and puts you in a castle. You see those images of Coleen in her school uniform and then getting married in a castle in Italy five years later. Who wouldn’t want that?”

Michelle has seen both sides of the modern fairytale. She’s experienced the glamour and excitement. But she’s also had a ring-side seat on the ugly side of WAG life – and how footballers view the girls who want them.

“Lots of girls now see it as a leg up to fame,” she says. “That’s what the WAGs hate. Those girls who are deliberately targeting their men is such a sore point with them. These are things that girls have no idea about. The footballers are fully aware they are being targeted and they don’t think much of the girls who do it. They just use them and abuse them. For the girls it’s the big dream, the getting married in a castle in Italy but 99 per cent of the time, the girls who just want to be with a footballer, they are the girls he avoids marrying.”

The girls they do marry, she says, are the ones who have something to bring to the party. She says the WAGs she knows are very smart, savvy girls.

When Michelle married Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace star Mark Bright, now a TV sports pundit, the cult of the WAG had yet to be invented. They wed in Las Vegas in 1995 when she was household name as Hettie in EastEnders and had a pop career.

“In many ways it was like the fairy tale,” Michelle says of their 10-year marriage. “You do get treated very well. I’ve been on helicopters and taken to Monte Carlo and it was fun. But I’d worked since I was 14 to get where I was in my career, so the lifestyle didn’t define me. I never felt if I never had those things again life wouldn’t be worth anything.