Jul 9, 2006, 13:52 GMT
London - The 'WAGs' - the wives and girlfriends of the hapless England football squad - have seen their last World Cup, if the English Football Association (FA) has its way, Sunday's English press reported.
The FA aims to ensure that the WAGs, who generated reams of copy for Britain's tabloid and mainstream press through their all-day shopping and late-night partying, will not again be able to block- book hotel accommodation, according to the Sunday Times.
'While it cannot stop the relatives making their own arrangements, it hopes to avoid a similar situation to that in Germany where the WAGs were all ensconced in the spa town of Baden-Baden and each time they stepped outside were pursued by paparazzi,' the Times said.
The paper said the women had run up a hotel bill of more than 250,000 pounds (460,000 dollars) - to be paid by their respective men.
It cited tales of 65,000-pound shopping bills being run up within an hour and of bottles of champagne at 40 pounds a throw being consumed a score at a time while the WAGs danced on chairs.
A report in the Mail on Sunday - headed WAGageddon - said some of the younger WAGs had been overheard calling their boyfriends as late as 4 am, despite former coach Sven-Goran Eriksson's imposition of a 10.30 pm bedtime on match days and midnight at other times.
Now the new England manager Steve McClaren aims to put a stop to the women's antics.
A source at the FA's Soho Square headquarters in London told the Mail: 'The support of people closest to the players will not be discouraged but he would rather a similar situation did not occur again. The photographs and headlines were regrettable.'
The losers will be the English newspaper-reading public - and the shops and restaurants in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 2010.
But the reports cast doubt on whether the tactic would work. The Mail said the women were likely to earn around five million pounds from book and modelling contracts as a result of their new-found celebrity status.
And the Observer reported some of the WAGs had secured a lucrative television deal that would pit them against one other - testing not their ball skills, but their fashion knowledge.
That lure of that kind of money seemed set to ensure WAGamania would win out in South Africa in 2010.
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