Top Premier League clubs hire care teams to keep players and bored WAGs happy

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Top football clubs are employing care teams to help miserable WAGS cope with life in Britain. Bosses fear players heading home to bored and grumpy wives may be nagged into quitting the Premier League .

Player care expert Hugo Scheckter, who has worked at clubs including West Ham and Brentford, said his primary role was looking out for the players' wellbeing - but that often crossed over into looking out for their partners and family too.

He said: “The partners, especially at the Premier League level, none of them tend to work or very few of them tend to work, and so you have a situation where they've just sat around and so trying to provide a purpose for them and a direction for them is really important.

“We see it more and more where the player is really happy, but the partner or the family aren’t, and so we're seeing clubs invest more and more into family programs.

“It can be hard moving to a new country. We're definitely seeing that as a bigger issue, where players are happy, partners are not, and then that’s leading to a player either wanting to leave or talking about potentially having to leave, which is a disaster for clubs.”

Some WAGS have famously moaned about life in the UK. When asked about her favourite restaurant in Manchester , City star Ilkay Gundogan’s wife Sara griped: “Sorry, I’m sad to be honest but nothing. I tried so bad to find a good restaurant but horrible food everywhere. Can’t find a real Italian or good sushi or just fresh food . . . everywhere frozen.”

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Man United flop Angel Di Maria's wife Jorgelina Cardoso hated Manchester so much she said the city made her want to kill herself.

“It was always horrible! I didn’t like it at all… I can tell you. People are all weird . You walk around and you don’t know if they’re going to kill you. The food is disgusting. The women look like porcelain.

“I don’t blame him for going there. It was horrible, so horrible. I told him, ‘Darling, I want to kill myself, it’s night time at two o’clock’.”

Hugo, who set up the Player Care Group in 2020, said: “There's a growing understanding throughout sport that mental well-being is important to performance. We want to take away the burden of the stresses associated with everyday life as much as we can so players can focus on training and matches.

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“It's based around the person rather than the player. A very vague way of putting it is that it's everything that affects a player that's not football or medical. For three or four hours a day, players are at the training ground. Everything outside of that can be covered by player care.

“It could be personal-developmental stuff, giving them the life skills to improve themselves, welfare stuff like signposting to mental health provisions, or operational things like relocations and problem-solving. We're trying to be that resource where they can remove the stress away from life to focus on football.

“Coaches and medical staff will know everything about a player's performance, but the player care or player support team know far more about their non-football lives than a manager or coach. And the two things are intertwined. One impacts the other.”