My nights with wannabe WAGs made me ashamed of my sex

By Amanda Platell

Last updated at 12:59 AM on 12th February 2010

One-thirty on a freezing February night at one of London's most fashionable nightclubs and there are enough nubile young women corralled onto the heaving dance floor to keep even John Terry happy.

Well, for one night perhaps - there are only a hundred or so of them, after all.

The venue is Movida, a favourite with footballers, C-list celebrities and rich City boys - all of them not so much spending money as throwing it away. Wads and wads of it. Twenty and £50 notes are peeled off like Monopoly money. 

Perfect job for snaring footballers: Vanessa Perroncel was a cocktail waitress who had a baby with Wayne Bridge and an affair with John Terry, right

And, as we all know, only naughty people carry cash. Ones who do not want their credit card bills to betray them to their wives. 

The heavily made-up, scantily-clad young girls troop in three by three - not so much Noah's as Noleen's Ark.

These long-legged fillies excitedly clatter down the stairs from pavement level, their hooves shod mostly in cheap stilettos so high they make them look ridiculously tall, slightly deformed, like creatures from Avatar.

And they all have the Victoria Beckham stoop that comes with such ridiculous shoes.

The girls' legs go on for ever; as do their dreams of pulling a footballer or a millionaire.

They sway suggestively to the blaring music, drinks clutched in by acrylic-tipped fingers, waving their bottoms at passing boys, thrusting their pert breasts, stroking their bare thighs, licking their lips, tossing their hair extensions.

I am witnessing the mating ritual of the Wannabe WAG. It's a sight worthy of a David Attenborough documentary. Think of a herd of frisky wildebeest stampeding through the Serengeti plain, stopping only to drink and procreate.

The skirts are so short they leave nothing to the imagination. I swear there is only one pair of undies in that club - and I am wearing them. 

It was in a club like this that John Terry's mistress, the lingerie model Vanessa Perroncel, pulled her first footballer. She worked at Elysium, down the road from Movida in Regent Street, Piccadilly. As a cocktail waitress, hers was the perfect job for snaring footballers. 

Let's get one thing straight: there are no victims here, just piranhas - male and female - hungry for quick sex (him) and the chance of a lifetime (her).

The girls are complicit in this mating game because the stakes are so high. If they're smart enough, it's their chance to turn a one-night stand into a lasting relationship with a footballer (if that isn't a non sequitur).

With any luck, as with Vanessa Perroncel and that poor sap Wayne Bridge - her footballer boyfriend - you get pregnant, have the kid and set yourself up for life living off the fat of his football fortune.

The figures involved are staggering. Vanessa and Wayne Bridge lived together for only a few years before they split and she had an affair with his best friend, John Terry. 

Rebecca Loos, left, only had to have an alleged affair with a footballer to achieve fame while Chanelle Hayes entered Big Brother saying her ambition was to be a WAG - she's now pregnant with Middlesbrough player Matthew Bates' baby

Now, she's taking Bridge to court over maintenance. He's offered her a generous £10,000 a month, including maintenance for their son Jaydon, three. She wants an eye-watering £80,000 a month, plus, no doubt, their multi-million-pound home. (If you have a baby, you always get the house.)

These women are gold-diggers, pure and simple. And it's not hard to get pregnant when you couple a healthy young woman who's up for anything with a randy footballer.

As we discovered when John Terry got Vanessa pregnant, arranging and paying for abortions for their mistresses is par for the course for the footballers of today, who are for some sad and sick reason treated as demi-gods in 21st-century Britain.

As I am discovering, the mating ritual goes something like this: the girls arrive mostly in threes, buy the cheapest, largest drink they can get, then wait.

This is the bit when the gyrating begins, as men in small groups leave their tables at the side of the dance floor and approach a group of women they're interested in. 

The girls tout their wares as shamelessly as hookers in an Amsterdam red light district. They are either met with a look of utter disdain by their would-be suitor and Champagne provider, or the man jerks his head, indicating she can join him at his table.

They don't talk and they don't touch, yet. But there's no one-for-all-and-all-for-one camaraderie here. If a girl gets lucky, she dumps her mates and goes and sits on the bloke's lap, downing vodka shots with Champagne chasers.

That's the reason they come in threes: so if one girl gets 'lucky', the other two aren't left on their own. The sisterhood isn't dead after all.  

The tables are all pre-booked and mostly taken by men, with some women tagging along. Prices vary from £500 to £1,000 for a table, but with Cristal Champagne at £350 to £500 a bottle, that's chicken feed.

The VIP lounge is the place to flog your wares if you want to meet a rich man. It's full of men with money, while the girls hang around outside nursing their drinks, hoping against hope that they'll be invited in.

It was in a suite like this, in a club like this, that Rebecca Loos began her affair with David Beckham when he was playing for Real Madrid. Even if you don't get past the mistress stakes - as Rebecca failed to do - sleeping with footballers is a well-remunerated calling.

There's a fortune in just having slept with a high-profile footballer. It's estimated that Ms Loos has made around £1 million from her affair with Beckham. Nice work if you can get it - and the kind of money lingerie models and cocktail waitresses couldn't earn in a lifetime.

And there's the rub, because the only way most of these girls will ever be able to afford a Prada handbag is if some man buys it for them.

Dismayed: Amanda Platell

Girls on the prowl don't want to be named in this newspaper. Discretion is crucial if you want to get lucky. But in the ladies, they loosen up a bit. One girl, who tells me her name is Pippa, put it perfectly as she trowels on another layer of black eyeliner.

She is 17 and works in the make-up section of a large department store.

'I'll be lucky if I ever earn more than £30,000, and that'd be after years of working there,' she says.

'Footballers earn £150,000 in a week. You do the maths. That's the way to get rich, and you get famous and appear in OK! and have fantastic holidays. Even if it's just an affair, they still give you loads of money to spend.'

She tells me one of her girlfriends had a three-month affair with a married footballer who was a father-of-two.

She wouldn't say who, but he not only gave her piles of cash to spend shopping on clothes and shoes and handbags, he also gave her a £30,000 'kiss-off' when he dumped her, to keep her sweet and quiet.

So it comes as no surprise that Terry gave his mistress Vanessa a £20,000 bung to go and cheer herself up after she agreed to abort his child. Not so much coochie, coochie, coo, but Gucci Gucci goo.

Talking to these girls, I'm actually taken aback by how normal they are. They aren't under-class trash; they're what one would describe, in different circumstances, as nice working-class and middle-class girls whose parents might be teachers or accountants.

After all, the cost of a night out, even if you buy only one or two drinks, is not cheap.

Entry to a club is £15 to £20 each, and for a drink - even the cheapest - you won't see much change from a tenner. (Most of the girls have already fuelled up at home with vodka shots and wine before they head out.)

And then there's the cost of transport. You can't do all that on a job seeker's allowance.

When I move on to Boujis - Princes William and Harry's favourite club - I find girls who are still pretty ordinary looking. Their particular targets are the wealthy men from landed families and the financial traders who flock to the club, and the only suggestion that these girls are classier than the Movida girls is that they wear tights with their six-inch skirts.  

But wherever I go, whatever the club - famous, aristocratic, fashionable or discrete - one thing is the same: it's shocking how shameless the girls are.

They know they're trading sex for drinks, and the chance of a footballer or a celebrity or a rich boy - depending on the club - taking them back to a hotel for a liaison which, if they're lucky, that man might actually remember.

Because for these girls, with so many of them literally flinging themselves at the men with money, it's all about being memorable. When you see young women en masse, you wonder how it is that feminism went wrong for too many of today's young women.

They behave not so much like Stepford wives, as Stepford tarts, unabashed that they are using sex to procure designer clothes, utterly complicit in the cattle market that unfolds before me wherever I go.

As far as the girls are concerned, it beats working for a living. And to them it's a win-win situation if they can trap a footballer even for a few weeks.

That way, they get to meet his pals, and widen the 'pulling pool' - just like Vanessa Perroncel did.

'Men like to be with more than one girl,' one of Pippa's friends told me at Movida, as she rolled the top of her skirt over to make her micro-mini even shorter.

'It's not common or anything, you know. Tiger Woods did it. You have to do things they like or they don't ask you back.'

At another club, in Piccadilly, I settle in to watch a handsome man walk up to a group of hopeful-looking girls at the bar and offering to buy a drink for the prettiest of them. 

Former WAG: Charlotte Mears, right, once dated Jermain Defoe

She readily accepts, and before long is downing Champagne as if it's water. Soon, she is sitting astride him at his table and greedily kissing him. 

About half an hour later they leave together, only to return ten minutes later, looking rather dishevelled and, I notice, as I stand next to them at the bar, smelling of cigarettes.

She is wiping her nose with the glazed stare of the regular cocaine user.

Once they have gone to sit down again, I ask the woman at the bar where they'd gone.

'Out for a s**g and a fag,' she says. And without a hint of irony she adds: 'They can do coke in the loos, but they can't smoke. That's against the law.'

But these girls are a law unto themselves. Quite why they seem to have abandoned all hope of a proper career, except one spent on their backs, is a mystery.

It's not that they're stupid - but studying and making something of yourself is hard work, and, increasingly, many young women are disinclined to do so.

And when you read surveys telling us that one in five young women now wants to be a WAG or a pole-dancer, you realise they're perpetrating the oldest profession in the world.

They're selling their bodies to the highest bidder. And they know they have to rake in the money while they can, for theirs is an even shorter career than footballers have.

After all, there's no such thing as an old WAG.

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