Dangerous liaisons,fatal women: The fear and fantasy of soccer wives and girlfriends in Spain

Methodology

I first started to pay attention to the media presence of super WAGs when I was collecting material for my ethnographic monograph on soccer culture in Spain between 2010 and 2012. Spain was effervescing with what was going to become its most historical World Cup in the summer of 2010. After the initial loss against Switzerland, it was very difficult to ignore the figure of Sara Carbonero for the sheer quantity and the emotional charge of the media discourse devoted to her nationally and internationally. A few weeks later as she entered the Spanish soccer scene, the media descriptions of Columbian singer Shakira made the predominant themes of demonization, fear and fantasy even more apparent. It was these themes that made me research the third super WAG in the Spanish context, Victoria Beckham. The selection of these women is not arbitrary: the notoriety of the media and fans toward these particular women stands in contrast to WAGs of no personal fame, who are not likely to be demonized as ‘fatal women.’ It appears that a woman’s social-economic power and prestige enhances her ability to be a ‘dangerous destabilizer’. While this article is limited to Spain as that country was the focus of my research, one should emphasize that similar discourses have been relevant in international sports.

The criterion I employed in data collection was the storage and analysis of any article that had to do with these women. Because of their global interest, the number of relevant news items is inestimable, while clear thematic tendencies were detectable. Locating articles in the Internet was similar to snowball sampling, as most pieces had links to related news as they traveled through the global media. One surprising revelation was the readiness of not only tabloid, but also serious news outlets to feature the demonizing WAG-discourse. El País, El Mundo, ABC, El Correo and 20 Minutos are dailies of the greatest national, regional and/or Internet circulation, and Marca is the leading sport daily in Spain. International authorities to have featured these cases include the BBC, The Guardian, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times, to mention a few. The style and language of empirical descriptions provided here emulates the style and language of the media and popular soccer talk.

The data source included not only articles, but hundreds, often thousands of readers’ comments that each news item potentially generated. I reviewed these comments with a vision of identifying the trends of popular opinion and beliefs about WAGs and female sexuality. Interpretive, qualitative content analysis was applied to discursive data as I looked for a metanarrative behind the commentary. While quotes in this discussion are my personal choosing, they reflect general trends of the media and public opinion. During content analysis I paid special attention to gendered ideologies, meanings and behavioral expectations, stereotypes, metaphors and innuendos. Finally, my extended ethnographic research in Spain enabled me to have special sensitivity to, and awareness of, the depths and dimensions of popular preoccupations in the world of soccer.

Fans, players, leaders, reporters—and lovers: women in men’s sport

‘The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football’, Mariah Burton Nelson (1994) argues, pointing at men’s desire to escape from their increasingly powerful women to a male homosocial realm. Michael Kimmel (2005: 20) argues that American manhood has been historically defined by an impulse to run away from the feminizing influence of women: ‘off to the frontier, the mountains, the forests, the high seas, the battlegrounds, outer space’—and ultimately to football and baseball stadiums. Men’s sport has been a separate ‘homosocial preserve where men can be men without female interference’ (Kimmel, 2005: 21). Because of its male dominance, the identity of the women who enter this context becomes salient. Because men often experience women’s insertion in male-dominated realms as disruptive, subversive and dislocating, they will want to impact gender identities and gender role behaviors (Sartore and Cunningham, 2007: 252).This prompts various redressive actions and coping mechanisms that serve to counter female ‘intrusion’ and perpetuate male power and control. Before considering the specific case of WAGs, I will briefly review these mechanisms applied toward women as athletes, fans, leaders and sport reporters.

With regards to female athletes in sport, there have been two main mechanisms, both of which effectively distract from, and trivialize, women’s subjectivity as athletes: focusing on their femininity through sexualization on the one hand, and the lesbian label on the other (Roth and Basow, 2004). ‘Techniques of sexualization’ include sexist commentaries, camera foci lingering on feminine body parts, and selective focus on feminine athletes by the media (Hargreaves, 1994: 164–169). The homophobic use of the lesbian label has ushered female athletes toward the ‘feminine apologetic’ (Theberge, 2000: 11), to ‘normalizing’ their image as women through shampoo commercials and nude calendars. In a similar spirit of ‘normalization’, gender stereotyping sport coverage often features women in heterosexual roles of wife- and motherhood (Koivula, 1999). “Labels like ‘bicycle face syndrome’, ‘damaged mothers’, ‘muscle molls’, ‘gender anomalies’,‘nymphomaniacs’, and ‘predatory dykes’ have served to scare women out of sports (Griffin, 1998: 29–50), and the lesbian label still effectively prompts heterosexual women to quit sports associated with homosexuality (Harris, 2005).

‘Becoming a female fan’, Amir Ben-Porat (2009: 886) writes in the context of Israeli soccer, is ‘metaphorically a process of conquering a piece of land in “men’s territory”’. As with the female athlete, the female fan’s insertion too provokes redressing actions and coping mechanisms. Men’s mediation between female fans and fandom, the socialization of women into fandom by fathers, brothers and boyfriends inadvertently perpetuates their power over acceptable female behavior. While a game is a carnival zone of licenses for men with regards to language and aggression, these remain inhibitions for women: instead of participation, they need protection from male behaviors. In extreme cases, women’s ‘purity’ is feared to be ‘contaminated through overstimulation by the football spectacle, the bad language and rowdy behavior of male supporters, the voyeuristic gaze of the male supporter upon the female fan, as well as the female supporter’s gaze on the footballer’s insufficiently covered body’ (Toffoletti, 2012: 5). But even when women’s presence is normalized in the stadium, the legitimacy of their authentic fandom is often questioned as male fans deny their ability to experience genuine commitment and passion, or ‘hot fandom’ (Pope, 2013). In the context of UK ice hockey for example, many male fans consider young female fans not as real fans but ‘puck bunnies’, groupies that are more interested in the players than the game (Crawford and Gosling, 2004). Another male strategy of de-legitimizing female fandom is the argument that women are unable to possess expertise about sport (Rodríguez, 2005).

These strategies of de-legitimization have real consequences: gender role ideology and stereotypes effectively bar women from employment in positions such as coaching, journalism or management. Indeed, these professions are overwhelmingly masculine, except for the attractive sideline reporter, who is much desired on the sidelines as long as she does not venture in the deep space of the male locker room to extract information and ‘intrude into male certainties’ (Disch and Kane, 1996: 282). Reasons for the under-representation of women in leadership positions may be attributed to gender role meanings and stereotypes associated with sport ideology, which often prompt women to ‘self-limit’ and forego their ambitions of leadership in a male-dominated arena (Sartore and Cunningham, 2007). My own research on female leadership in a first division Spanish soccer club shows that, while a woman’s face may be desirable on the board of directors to emanate a modern, progressive image, effective agency in the everyday operations of the club was very limited in that particular case from the 1990s.

Critical analysis of the WAGs of male elite athletes identifies them as relegated to auxiliary positions and subservience. Desmond Morris (1981: 181–182), while we should note that he was a zoologist and his book Soccer Tribe is a popular reading rather than an academic analysis, writes this about WAGs in 1981:

The soccer star wants his ideal woman to be feminine, beautiful and fun-loving, but not too much of a challenge. He has enough challenges to face on the pitch and wants a more peaceful relationship in his sex-life. (…) She is the warrior’s girl, the hunter’s wife, and together they make good, lasting marriages, rear their children with warmth and pride, and enjoy a home life rather more satisfying than the average family of today.

More recent research presents WAGs as fulfilling the expectations of mainstream femininity, and thus affirming compulsory heterosexuality and archetypal manliness (Clayton and Harris, 2004: 324). WAGs in British soccer have been identified as ‘hero-worshipping’ partners in non-active roles (Harris, 1999: 106). Similarly, American rodeo wives take the role of ‘helpmates’ who dedicate themselves to facilitating the sport careers of their often-absent partners (Forsyth and Thompson, 2007: 404). Baseball wives in the United States, while they enjoy considerable social prestige even in lower divisions, fulfill a traditional role of support for their husbands (Gmelch and San Antonio, 2001). These women remain dependent and subordinate: they are seen not as active agents but ‘as a player’s property, part of the assets he brings to the game’ (Gmelch and San Antonio, 2001: 346). Below and beyond the vivacious lifestyle of sex, shopping and extravagance WAGs often exude, they have to deal with geographical mobility, social isolation and the real danger of their husband’s infidelity. This brings us to other sexual personae around male athletes: the ‘groupies’ (‘puck bunnies’ in hockey and ‘buckle bunnies’ in rodeo). As they approach men for sex and would do anything to please them, they pose a threat to wives and marriages. At the same time, they are devalued and despised as deviant social types and even ‘whores’ (Forsyth and Thompson, 2007: 410).

I will now identify a different type of WAG altogether: the super WAG, the ‘dangerous woman’ who challenges the auxiliary, passive role of WAGs, and emerges as protagonist to whom significant powers are attributed.

When in doubt, blame the girlfriend: the inner demons of Spanish soccer

Spain, an undeniable World Cup favorite in 2010, started its performance with an unexpected defeat against Switzerland, which sent desperation through the nation. An image started to circulate on the Internet: that of the purple, Swiss Milka chocolate cow mounting the emblematic black Spanish bull. ‘How did that happen?’ the image insinuated, mockingly. For fans, it summed up a narrative anomaly: how come a country known for such ‘girly’ things as chocolate ‘scores’ against the world cup favorite and European Champion?

According to Girard, crisis emerges when the differences that define cultural divisions disappear, evidencing an extreme loss of the social order (1986: 12). Demonization is a result of crisis within the community. It is in crises that the community singles out scapegoats, and makes witchcraft accusations.

The media thought it knew the answer to the defeat: Spanish goalkeeper Casillas’ mind must have been on other things. Reiterating what the Spanish El Mundo had already insinuated two weeks before, namely that Sara Carbonero’s presence might ‘destabilize’ the national team, The Times claimed that the Spanish goalie Casillas ‘appeared dumbfounded (…). Carbonero has been voted sexiest journalist in the world. It was her, the fans insisted, who had sapped the strength of the Spanish goalkeeper and caused him to fluff what seemed an easy shot’ (Keeley and Williams, 2010). The media packaged the post-defeat instant interview of Carbonero with Casillas with headlines like ‘Goalie’s girlfriend starts the Spanish Inquisition’ (The Daily Mail Online, 2010) and as ‘Spanish Inquisition blames WAG after Swiss vanquish the favorites’ (Keeley and Williams, 2010). The idea that a 26-year-old journalist may destabilize the World Cup performance of the Spanish team was variously deemed absurd and sexist, but that did not prevent even respectable dailies from making headlines of the story. The image of Carbonero, standing by the sideline just behind the goal post of Casillas with a microphone in hand became a trademark image of the event.

The Colombian singer Shakira entered the Spanish soccer scene a few months later. She met Barcelona FC and Spanish team defender Gerard Piqué at the shooting of her Waka Waka song for the World Cup. The ‘waka rumor’ started.

The title of her 2010 album, She-Wolf, reflects how she soon came to be seen in Spain: a man-eating predator. On my way to Camp Nou before a 2011 February game in Barcelona, the taxi driver was quick to diagnose the problem in Shakira’s relationship with Piqué. ‘This is not normal. She is 34, he is 24, and she is a tigress. Of course she dries him out!’ ‘You really mean to say’, I asked him, ‘that a woman is capable of destabilizing the best soccer team of the world?’ ‘Of course they can! They have destabilized entire nations!’ The belief in that capacity was manifested on the terraces of stadiums wherever Barcelona FC played: the fans of opponent teams would sing Shakira songs and display boards in the hope of distracting the defender’s attention.

The anticipation of failure due to a woman’s influence became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Piqué was not indeed at his best. ‘Too much waka waka’ was the widely believed reason for the drop of his performance, and the player felt obliged to speak out in a press conference: ‘Performance does not depend on one’s private life’ (Herrero, 2011). His statement provoked thousands of comments convinced of the contrary: ‘It is obvious that all this distraction will take its toll on Barça. We have seen that the performance of culés (Barcelona squad) has dropped in an undeniable manner lately’ (Herrero, 2011). ‘The fact is that since you have been with Shakira, you have not even kicked an air ball’ (Herrero, 2011). The few more sober comments were quickly dismissed: ‘You are talking about Shakira as though she was so innocent; with those cock tease songs she is always singing?’ (Herrero, 2011). As the defender’s relationship with Shakira grew, a blogger wrote, ‘so too did his waistline: Piqué fell in love with one of the world’s most glamorous singers—and fell out of love with the beautiful game’ (Hayward, 2013).

The sentence managers most fear when they want to contract or re-contract a player is ‘I need to speak with my wife.’ Coaches fear wives’ influence on men’s career choices may be motivated by night life and shopping opportunities (Taylor, 2007). ‘After considering various options with my family’, David Beckham said in Real Madrid in 2007, ‘I decided to leave Madrid and sign with Los Angeles Galaxy’ (20 Minutos, 2007). The multiple brand personalities of David Beckham, which artfully offered something for everyone from working class families to urban gay subcultures, were shaped by his wife and ex-Spice Girls singer Victoria Beckham (Vincent et al., 2009). That the player should choose Hollywood and the Major League Soccer of arguable reputation over the global soccer capital (Madrid) had one explanation: Victoria longed for glamour.

The Spanish media had launched a war on ‘posh’ Victoria Beckham for her undisguised disdain of Spain as provincial and backward. ‘The streets of Madrid smell of garlic’ (Cantalapiedra, 2008), she said once in the media; another time she said ‘it was very difficult to be a woman in Spain because of the inequality between the sexes’ (El País Actualidad, 2009). When Victoria Beckham openly confronted Spanish sensationalist press diva Ana García Obregón in a Madrid gym about the latter’s alleged affair with husband David, the Spanish media celebrated Obregón as a moral victor who had just paid back substantial historical debt: ‘Two hundred years after the Battle of Trafalgar, the memory of Admiral Gravina, who led the Spanish fleet and was beaten by Nelson, is finally rehabilitated (…) a new Gravina (…) against the perfidious Albion represented by Victoria Beckham’ (Baragaño, 2005).

Blame, scapegoating, demonization and the pathologization of female sexuality resonate with archetypal conceptualizations: the ‘dangerous women’ of men’s sports are the latest chapter in the rich cultural representation of femmes fatales.

Cultural representations of the ‘dangerous woman’, and her emergence in sport

In Christopher Marlowe’s version, Doctor Faustus describes Helen of Troy as having ‘the face that launched a thousand ships.’ Virginia Allen (1983) argues that the femme fatale emerged from a dualistic concept of the feminine. In occidental cultures, this dualistic concept revolves around the Mary versus Eve dichotomy, which juxtaposes the mother figure, the obedient Mary who says ‘fiat’ to the patriarchal order, with Eve, who by disobeying the same order leads her male companion into a compromising situation. The first consistent representations of the fatal woman emerged in the visual arts of European decadentism and symbolism, and were inspired by the archetypes of religion and myth. Culturally specific variations of the femme fatale include Delacroix’s Medea, Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci, Edward Munch’s Madonna, Rider Haggard’s She, Bram Stoker’s female vampires, the divas of Italian silent cinema and the femmes fatales of American film noir.

What the male subject perceives as ‘fatal’ is her engulfing femininity; rather than ‘screening jouissance [enjoyment], she hoards it’ (Copjec, 1994: 198). The femme fatale is diametrically opposed to the good woman, the good wife who accepts her domestic settings and role as mother, as well as the control of her sexuality by a patriarchal order. She is reduced to a single signifier, that which is most feared and desired: unrepressed feminine sexuality. Her figure is disconcerting because the femme fatale becomes too powerful not to be a man. Dean MacCannell identifies the unease that Marilyn Monroe produced in her contemporaries in these terms: ‘She had male virtues, her profession, her craft (and something that is never admitted in these accounts, but always implicit, possession of sexuality), and these were what made her great. But she was not a man. She was absolutely uncompromising on this point’ (1987: 123).

The danger of women lies in their supposed capacity to drain male energies through sex: she epitomizes the danger of ‘physical and spiritual castration (…) every man runs in intercourse’ (Paglia, 1991: 13). For the male subject, the sex act with the femme fatale becomes a ‘moment of abandon (…), a loss of self-awareness (…) in the petite morte of orgasm’ (Allen, 1983: 2). Praz in his Romantic Agony referred to the ‘cannibalistic’ aspect of the femme fatale who ‘devours in the morning the lovers who have spent the night with her’ (Allen, 1983: 9). The femme fatale poses castration anxiety: she is ‘an articulation of fears surrounding the loss of stability and centrality of the self, the “I”, the ego’ (Doane, 1991: 2). Dozens of visual representations depict the New Testament femme fatale Salome as owning the ‘centrality of the self, the ‘I’, the ego’ of John the Baptist: his head.

Why does this sexual persona elaborated in art emerge precisely in sport? ‘Important structural homologies and allegorical implications articulate sports with sex’, Miller (2001: 16) writes. They became intimately linked in the 19th century. Industrial capitalism was fascinated with machinery and anxious over the limits of fuel, of energy that moves it. This mechanistic view was reflected in Victorian conceptions of the body: in the ‘spermatic economy’, or the ‘conservation of energy’ principle (Burstyn, 1999; Mangan and Parks, 1987; Messner, 1995). According to these views, the body possessed a limited, finite pool of energies that were not to be wasted on trivial pursuits. The mandate of the ‘spermatic economy’ was that men were to preserve their sexual energies for reproduction, and not to waste them on masturbation. Women were to put their energies into the service of reproduction by restraining from excessive education as it was believed to subtract energies from the development of reproductive organs. Sports were believed to expand one’s pools of energy, and Victorian England embraced them for their regenerative powers for both sexes.

The Victorian body economy and capitalism, therefore, secured an intimate link between sport, sex, production and re-production. That link remains strong today, while their relation has changed. Sports are no longer put in the service of (re-)production; they are production—the production of goals, victories, sport capital. Sex, in turn, is no longer the goal that sports serve, on the contrary. It is the ‘trivial pursuit’ that drains energies from the production of goals and victories.

Sex becomes all the more disconcerting in sports that condense a national, nationalistic or imperial ethos, as soccer has done in Britain and globally. ‘Each country’s national sport contributes toward producing and securing the male identity specific to that particular country’, Pfister, Fasting, Scraton et al. (1999: 19–20) quote Klein, which explains ‘not only why in all societies the national sport is a male preserve…but also why it is linked to sexual demands, needs and anxieties’. While there is no scientific consensus on the effects of sex on sport performance, popular anxieties over the weakening effects of sex abound. They resonate with the Victorian spermatic economy, and become especially marked when the athlete embodies the masculinity of a nation. ‘If you love your champion, go easy on the love-making. It slows him up, and [he needs to be] very quick on his feet’, Loucien Roupp (in Berteaut, 1970: 266) told the famous singer Edith Piaf, the lover of world class boxer Marcel Cerdan, who embodied France just when it went through national humiliation in World War II. Barcelona soccer fans, for whom the club is a major symbol of Catalan identity (Llopis-Goig, 2008; Vaczi, 2013) expressed their worries over Piqué having sex with Shakira in terms of the same economy: ‘Instead of burning his energies on the football field, he burns them with her’ (Herrero, 2011). When Sara Carbonero had breast implants in November 2010, Madrid fans got concerned that the goalie ‘Casillas has now two more balls to take care of’ (20 Minutos, 2010). When the Brazilian team was eliminated in the quarter-finals of the 2006 Soccer World Cup, star player Ronaldhino was deemed to be ‘too busy scoring on his girlfriend to score for Brazil (techdirt, 2006).

Sealed with a kiss: the femme fatale as trauma and suture

In her discussion of the logic of detective stories, Jean Copjec (1994: 170) quotes an interview with Francois Truffaut, where Alfred Hitchcock describes a scene he planned to include in North by Northwest:

I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers [at a Ford automobile plant] as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a single nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at each other and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ They open the door to the car and out drops a corpse’.

The dead body dropping from a car that has just rolled off the conveyor belt is what Copjec calls the ‘locked-room paradox’. What’s that corpse doing there? Where did it come from? If the entire process of car production is controlled and its space is sealed, how is it possible for a corpse to be extracted from it? The corpse points at a surplus element in the set of signifiers: a surplus element that allows the corpse to be extracted from a sealed space. By analogy, women constitute a ‘locker-room paradox’, the locker room standing metonymically for the deep space of men’s sport. What is she doing there? How did she get there, despite its control and seal? The female journalist licensed to enter male locker rooms is the most literal representation of this paradox and the anxieties her presence may provoke. In 1990 in the Patriot’s locker room as she interviewed players after practice, the journalist Lisa Olson was sexually harassed and called a ‘dick-watching bitch’ (Disch and Kane, 1996: 279), which provoked a nation-wide debate about female access to male locker rooms.

A woman in men’s sport becomes what Butler (1990a: 109) would call a ‘semantic excess’ that ‘haunts and contests the borders which circumscribe the construction of stable identities’ (Rose in Butler, 1990a: 108). She constitutes excess, an over-presence that threatens male identity. The demonization of women as ‘dangerous’ is a symptom of anxieties over the empowerment and emancipation of women (Allen, 1983). The femme fatale represents Otherness: ‘chaos, darkness, death, all that lies beyond the safe, the known, and the normal’ (Stott, 1992: 37). She produces a certain ‘discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma’ (Doane, 1991: 2). As representations of an order of trauma, anxiety and ambiguity, ‘dangerous women’ disturb the edifice of men’s sports by inserting fantasies of sexual drives and desires in a symbolic system of production and capital.

The agony of the symbolic system between the fear and enjoyment of these fantasies is palpable through what Krips (1999: 29) would call the ‘fetishistic disavowal’ of the ‘dangerous woman’. The sport system is very much aware of its main object of desire: goals and victories. Yet, a kiss may cause fans to channel emotional investment toward that other object, woman. This transference of desire turns the femme fatale into a fetish, a substitute object that nevertheless inspires overwhelming preoccupation. The economy of fetishistic disavowal is delineable in the way fans and the media handle the over-presence of women. ‘I know it’s only a woman, a kiss, and what matters is the victory of my team…I know, and yet, even so…’ Soccer fans in Spain know that preoccupation with athletes’ sex life is sensationalist, even telebasura or ‘television trash’ in comparison with the serious business of scoring goals; yet, even so, they cannot resist the enjoyment of her fantasy. ‘Why do I have to read about Shakira on the front page of Marca? This is a sport daily!’ sports fans would complain indignantly. However, as Butler (1990a: 108) argues on account of the prohibition of pornography, ‘certain kinds of efforts to (…) reign the imaginary, control the phantasmatic, end up reproducing and proliferating the phantasmatic in inadvertent ways (…) always and only leading to its production’. The economy of fetishistic disavowal is such an effort. News on super WAGs continue to proliferate in both serious and sensational media, and routinely rank among the top most read news items.

Fantasies, Hinerman (1992) argues, emerge as a reaction to a lack: they serve to help individuals regain a sense of full identity, plenitude and oneness. We fantasize of what is missing, and often what is prohibited. From this perspective, the erotic imaginary around WAGs in men’s sport serves to fill a lack in the system. Indeed, any system of representation, Rose (1986) argues, is a ‘not all’; they have a point of impossibility. That impossibility is the other face of the system that it seeks to refuse, to the point that the system becomes a function of what it is attempting to evade. Woman, in our case the ‘dangerous woman’, finds herself placed in this process (Rose, 1986: 219). She becomes the impossibility that the system seeks to refuse, through which she guarantees the system. ‘On the one hand’, Rose (1986: 219) quotes Lacan, ‘woman becomes, or is produced, precisely as what he is not, that is, sexual difference, and on the other as what he has to renounce, that is, jouissance [enjoyment]’. In sports as a masculinist system of representation, the ‘dangerous woman’ means this: what he is not (difference), and what he has to give up (sexual excess).

For the purposes of the detective story, the surplus of the dead body comes to constitute a narrated world and a group of suspects: without the body, the surplus, they would cease to exist. ‘Dangerous women’ in men’s sports have the same function: they are a supplementary element that is added to the series of signifiers in order for the series to gain meaning. That series of signifiers, the heteronormative iconography of men’s sport condenses traits that have defined man. The athlete-man is the chivalrous night, the exemplary leader, the defender of the cause. He is the hunter seeking the weak points of his prey, the warrior who defends his flag and gives it all for his country. He is the sailor, the vagabond, the playboy and the rugged individual whose freedom and adventures we savor vicariously, and the gambler who puts everything at risk. Male athlete subjectivity has been translated in terms of these metaphors, and to secure itself, this narrative needs a female figure who interacts with it. It needs a sexual persona with a capacity to distract the male subject from his cause; a muse who inspires; a prey, the greatest score of the athlete; a prostitute, the illicit pleasure of away games; chance, the ultimate governor of the play frame. Ultimately, the kiss of the ‘dangerous woman’ is celebrated as the most significant conquest or ‘score’ of the athlete. ‘What else is left for you, Piqué? World Champion, League, Champions League, King’s Cup, Super Cup champion, and Shakira… what a record!’ (Herrero, 2011).

That is how the femmes fatales of men’s sport come short of their promise of subversion. ‘Me capable of destabilizing the world cup?’ Sara Carbonero reacted apologetically to anxieties about her ‘intrusion’ in the most globally broadcast male sport arena. ‘I don’t think I have such powers’ (Europa Press, 2010). ‘Destabilizing’ a World Cup would have implicitly meant the destabilization of a male complex. Fantasy narratives, however, end up working toward the confirmation rather than subversion of male agency, hegemonic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality. The insertion of ‘fatal’ super WAGs, like that of the attractive sideline reporter, merely serves as ‘strategic absorption (…), without having to significantly alter the underlying masculine structure and value systems’ (Skerski, 2006: 89). The commodified media presence of the ‘dangerous woman’ turns into a production of couple motif similar to Hollywood narratives, where major historical events appear as though they merely served to bring the lovers together. The femme fatale’s presence in the narrative of men’s sport lets him reposition himself again within the texture of his symbolic fate and win the world cup for his country, which she then seals with a kiss.