Meet the Claudia Schiffer set

The news that the wedding of Claudia Schiffer to film producer Matthew Vaughn on Saturday evening will be consummated by a post-nuptials football match on the lawn of the couple's £5 million house, Coldham Hall in Lawshall, Suffolk, might have come as a bit of a surprise to Britain's celebrity watchers.

Even guests attending the wedding will surely be amused to see the ushers, who include Guy Ritchie, actor Jason Flemyng, Vinnie Jones and nightclub entrepreneur Piers Adam, stripping off their shirts and ties, dumping down their morning coats for goalposts and tucking into epicurean canap?s and chilled champagne for half-time snacks. But what may come as an even bigger surprise is that Claudia herself may well be swapping her Valentino wedding gown for a green jersey and a pair of studded boots.

Few realise that Claudia Schiffer, like Albert Camus, Julio Iglesias and the Pope before her, is one of the world's great unsung secret goalkeepers. She is, if you will, the David Seaman of the catwalk. I interviewed Claudia recently and expressed surprise when she was happy to sit in a pub with me drinking lager. She told me she was a Bayern Munich fan, that she grew up playing football in her Rheinberg back yard (just near Düsseldorf) with her younger brother Andreas and was always put in goal because of her height. She also revealed how Vinnie Jones, the footballer-turned-screen hard nut, is now a good friend of hers. "I love him!" she grinned. "I grew up with that type of guy - beer and football. It is normal for me."

But who, apart from Vinnie, makes up the Schiffer set? Is she, as reports have suggested, a family-orientated, low-key loner who likes quiet dinners with her partner? Or does she prefer to hang out at her recently completed "funky but masculine" Notting Hill apartment rearranging her vast, colourcoded shoe collection ("I am super organised!"); rehanging her collection of dried spiders and insects (she has a thing for arachnids); watching a DVD of her favourite movie The Producers (no kidding - the Teutonic beauty loves to sing along to Springtime for Hitler); admiring her Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol paintings; shopping for 20th century Italian furniture and visiting the Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery?

It might seem strange that a couple who are involved in two such fizzy businesses as movies and modelling would take such great pains to stay almost invisible in such a revved-up, whirling, social city as London, but they are adamant about protecting their privacy. "You have probably noticed that we have made a conscious decision to be low-profile," she told me as she sipped her beer, dressed in jeans and a sweater, looking like a teenager without her magazine-cover slap on. She is fiercely protective of her privacy," says a close friend.

She is very controlled. Yet at the same time she is such a giggle. She has me laughing like a drain on many an occasion."

Despite Claudia being staggeringly beautiful she has the seductive overbite of a porno rag milk-maid and the kind of piercing blue eyes that could burn holes in a Wilton carpet in the pub that day she didn't look like the world's richest supermodel (last year, Forbes Magazine, the USA's financial glossy, valued her 2000 earnings at around $9 million, well ahead of Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks and Christy Turlington. Her total wealth is estimated to be around £30 million), but maybe that is all part of her stealthy, low-key image. I've changed a lot over the past couple of years," she said. I've just grown up, I've totally changed everything in my life. Gotta move on."

Although her family remains pivotal in her life she is still very close to her father Karl-Heinz and mother Gudrun (also her lawyer and accountant respectively), her little sister Ann Carolin and brother Andreas she's had to make new friends since she split up with her previous fiancés, society gadabout Tim Jefferies and magician David Copperfield.

This west London coterie tends to be smart rather than cutting-edge trendy. Perhaps the most well-heeled is Tamara Mellon, the immaculately turned-out Jimmy Choo tycoon, and her mate Vassi Chamberlain, who works as an editor at Tatler magazine. Other friends include Lili Dent-Brocklehurst, wife of Liz Hurley's best friend Henry, Lady Helen Windsor who, with Claudia, is the face of Bulgari and, conveniently enough, Ilaria Bulgari.

Claudia also got to know super Euro and former Chanel employee Victoire de Castellane while she was working as a muse for Karl Lagerfeld. De Castellane is now the jewellery designer at Dior and Claudia is godmother to her child. Other chums include Valentino, who is making her wedding dress and Adela King, wife of Chester King, one of Matthew's old Stowe school friends. She is the sole importer of the American fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg's maternity-wear range, which may prove useful later on.

Friends such as Trudie Styler, Sting and Boris Becker will provide the A-list celebrity muscle at the wedding. Madonna and Claudia, however, are said to be not particularly close" and the fact that Mrs Ritchie is scheduled to appear on stage in Up for Grabs at Wyndham's Theatre on Saturday night means that it is unlikely that she will show up at the wedding. Elle Macpherson aside, there appear to be few model pals in Claudia's life, and in the past she has made no secret of the fact that she deplores the late-night bacchanalia of Kate Moss and her funloving set. It's probably just as well: once the football match gets under way, what use would their skinny limbs be when faced by a tackle from Vinnie Jones?

Schiffer's list: the wedding booty