If summer 2026 is the summer of sport, for fashion brands, it’s also the summer of WAGs — the wives and girlfriends of high-profile athletes. As the two industries continue to converge and more viewers than ever rally behind their favorite teams and players, brands also need to be watching the sidelines. There, the partners of players are getting plenty of airtime of their own — all while taking and appearing in content that circulates for days on socials.

The NBA craze of the last few weeks has made plain how much attention there is on the women showing up game after game. “The bag’s undefeated,” Knicks player Karl-Anthony Towns said while posing post-win with his fiancée Jordyn Woods, who sat courtside with what came to be known as her lucky orange bag on her lap each game of the finals. The bag is from her own brand, Woods by Jordyn, and is currently available on pre-order.

The Knicks fervor shows no signs of slowing, and was boosted throughout the weekend with a string of World Cup games that will continue through mid-July. Before the soccer final, Wimbledon will kick off on June 29 (followed by the US Open in late August), and F1 races will continue throughout the summer, with Austria, the UK and Belgium among the European cities drivers will hit before heading to Singapore, the US and Mexico later this year. Each event will attract its own line-up of partners there to support.

“WAGs connect so well to audiences, because they sit in a sweet spot between relatable and aspirational for young generations,” says Lea Mao, head of marketing at influencer marketing platform Lefty. They’re often young, and give a sense of ‘it could be you’. About 84% are aged between 18 and 34, while 80% are female — a highly coveted sweet spot for brands. “By bridging casual daily life with high-glam sports culture, [WAGs] offer brands a pre-built, culturally hot media cycle that doesn’t need to be manufactured.”

The summer might have only just begun, but WAGs across basketball, F1, and tennis have already generated $25.2 million in earned media value (EMV), according to Lefty. (EMV is the investment required for an advertiser to generate the same level of social media impact.) F1 WAGs dominated, driving $12 million of this EMV, closely followed by NBA WAGs, who generated $10.8 million. (Soccer wasn’t included in this analysis as the World Cup is only just beginning.)

“People still care about who wins — that’s fundamental to sport’s stickiness. But increasingly, a whole new audience also cares about who was there, what they wore, who they were with, what they posted afterward, and what it all means culturally,” says Holly Gilbertson, managing partner at creative consultancy Pacer. “That’s very fertile ground for WAG culture.” Sports fandom and spectatorship is finally gaining share, says Alice Crossley, principal strategic foresight analyst at strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory. “This means courtside culture is almost as exciting as game play,” she continues, pointing to Burberry’s latest campaign, A Good Sport, as an example of the amped-up focus on the bleachers. “It’s all about the fashion codes of spectatorship, not just sport.”

With so much of sports-mania concentrated in the US this summer — the residual Knicks hysteria bleeding into the biggest World Cup in history — the WAG impact has some serious room to grow. “[The World Cup] is hosted in a market where celebrity, sport, and entertainment are already deeply intertwined,” Gilbertson says. “This is the same tournament where WAG culture truly took hold in 2006, and the conditions this time are even richer. It’s effectively six weeks of uninterrupted people-watching. Every VIP box, cultural brand activation, and IG story becomes part of the spectacle. This summer has all the ingredients to create another perfect WAG storm.”

The new WAG

The implied meaning behind the phrase ‘WAG’ has shifted over the years, moving from a reductive insult to a far more-nuanced status symbol of sorts. “Proximity to sport and athletes now carries a level of aspirational value that goes beyond celebrity adjacency and into genuine cultural cachet,” Gilbertson says.

Some, like Kim Kardashian (who is dating F1 driver Lewis Hamilton), Elite actor Ester Expósito (recently confirmed to be dating French soccer player Kylian Mbappé), and singer and actor Coco Jones (who is dating Cleveland Cavaliers NBA player Donovan Mitchell) are famous to begin with.

But more often than not, these women become cultural figures by virtue of the players they’re seeing. Whereas during the toxic WAG culture of the early aughts, these women were made public figures by tabloids and pap pics, in 2026, WAGs can cultivate their own public personas by harnessing modern comms strategies — namely social media — as a tool they have full control of. Photos of themselves in the paddock or the stands are now dotted between selfies, travel shots, and brand deals.

Because of this, it’s not just about the profile of the players these women are dating — especially once they establish their own followings. It’s their proximity to culture that matters the most, Gilbertson says. Crosby points to Morgan Riddle, who became known via her former relationship with tennis player Taylor Fritz, but is now a sports industry force in her own right. As well as working as a creator, she co-founded 100 Club, a sports marketing agency and community offering women more access points to sport. “Women have been so overlooked historically in the industry that there is so much space for creativity and innovation,” Crosby says.

Brands should think of these women as part of a new sport-adjacent creator class, Gilbertson says. Many are already cashing in. Of the 31 WAGs and 627 brands studied by Lefty, Alo Yoga got the most mentions across social posts, at 14 tags. This was closely followed by beauty players L’Oréal and Rhode, which received eight and seven mentions, respectively.

Though this summer will be filled with back-to-back games, matches, and races, brands would be remiss to confine their work with WAGs of a given sport to a given season. “The biggest mistake brands make is treating sport as something that only exists when games are being played. The modern sports ecosystem never really goes off-season,” Gilbertson says. This summer is when more WAG profiles will be built up, making it an important moment for brands to establish longer-term relationships with these women.

Below, some of this summer’s many WAGs to watch — from the big, blockbuster names to the up-and-comers worth tapping early.

WAGs to watch

Some WAGs, like Georgina Rodríguez (longtime fiancée of Christiano Ronaldo), Alexandra Leclerc (F1 racer Charles Leclerc’s wife), and Kardashian regularly generate upward of $500,000 in media impact value (MIV), sometimes topping $1 million. Rodríguez, for instance, has generated $4.5 million in MIV for Alo so far this year, while Kardashian has made $8.8 million in MIV for Nike and a whopping $420 million for Gucci. (MIV measures the impact of brand mentions across voices and channels, assigning a monetary value to media exposure.)

As brands continue to align themselves with sports and athletes, the luxury opportunity is significant. Burberry has seen success in tapping WAGs, generating $330,000 in MIV via Carmen Montero Mundt (who dates F1 driver George Russell) and $337,000 via Francisca Gomes (whose boyfriend is driver Pierre Gasly).

What is most valuable to brands, however, are the fastest-growing engagements and followings. “The WAGs with the most engaging content are also experiencing the fastest follower growth,” Mao says.

Lefty wasn’t able to track the World Cup WAGs, because data is measured during the sports’ peak seasons. As the group stage progresses, though, certain WAGs are already generating serious surges in Google search, per data from Classic Football Shirts, which analyzes Instagram, Google and TikTok search data. Searches for Isabel Haugseng Johansen (girlfriend of Norway’s Erling Haaland) are up 119% year-on-year; Noa van der Bij (Dutch player Cody Gakpo’s longtime partner) is up 477%; Sara Arfaoui (Germany’s İlkay Gündoğan’s wife) is up 147%; and Naima Corbin (who married England’s Eberechi Eze last year) is up 3,100% year-on-year. Brands would be smart to tap in early.

Some high-reach influencers still have relatively thin brand portfolios, so are ideal targets for new partnerships. Cameron Aimonetti (dating Knicks player Landry Shamet), for instance, boasts a strong engagement rate and follower growth, according to Lefty.

To date, brand partnerships with WAGs have been majority sponcon (the standard sponsored Instagram or TikTok posts that guarantees a brand tag). Brands should, however, be looking at longer-term deals that carry beyond a given sport’s season. Take Leclerc, who has secured a number of such deals: her Frame capsule collection generated $4.8 million in MIV for the denim brand, $2.8 million of which stemmed from ‘direct impact’ (her posts) and ‘brand-owned’ (brand posts), with $2 million from ‘indirect echo’ (people talking about the collab). She’s also a L’Oréal Paris ambassador, having generated $3.7 million in MIV for the brand this year. Of this, $1 million stems from direct impact and brand-owned, $2.6 million from indirect echo.

Though, to date, partnerships have primarily centered around fashion, athleisure, beauty and skincare categories (the most frequently mentioned by WAGs), as more women come into the mix and grow their followings, the brand opportunity will continue to balloon. Lefty flags hotels as a white-space opportunity. Of the WAGs tracked, there were only two hotel mentions across the board. Hotels and hospitality would be smart to tap in, Mao says — these women are jet setters, after all.

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