The real footballers' wives

The kerbs of Bond Street are lined with Mercedes, assorted Porches and one canary yellow Ferrari. Men with enormous thighs and even bigger gold watches, seated on banquettes in Nicole Farhi, hold champagne flutes with giant fingers, while ash blondes in leather trousers finger buttery Donna Karan suede. This is it: I have entered the real world of Footballers' Wives. Here I am, rubbing glossily tanned shoulders with the gorgeous girls who've married some of the richest and fittest men in England.

The hit TV show Footballers' Wives has the chattering classes a-twitter with excitement. Today, following last night's episode, around coffee machines and water coolers all over London, professional men and women will talk of little else. The fictional characters who play on and off the pitch at Earls Park FC have us gripped, with their alcoholic excesses, their glamorous designer clothes, the sheer, fantastic tackiness of their houses. And now, amazingly, I'm out shopping with the real versions (none of them tacky, all of them glamorous) on a fresh London Sunday morning, in aid of a children's charity. So, what's it really like being a footballer's wife?

Mariana, the wife of Chelsea defender Graeme Le Saux, is in Donna Karan, looking at price tags and almost passing out, which is endearing in a Premiership wife. "Only a small minority of players earn £10,000 a week," she says, caressing a pair of peasant moccasins costing £420. "And don't forget, they have a very limited career span. We have to invest our money in pension plans."

She gave up her job in PR to have two children - Georgina, three, and Lucas, four months - and they recently moved from a mews house in Kensington to Buckinghamshire. She's keen to stress, though, that she has nothing in common with the characters in Footballers' Wives. She and her husband don't live in a mock-Tudor mansion, nor does she have the rather busy fashion sense of her fictional counterparts (she does, indeed, overlook a leopard-print dress with a large corsage in Ungaro). "I haven't even seen the programme," she says, heading off to Dunhill to retrieve husband and baby, "but Graeme says the locker room scenes aren't true to life at all. The actors are far too flabby."

Watching the wives in their natural habitat, I feel I should be wearing a safari suit, whispering from behind the potted palms. They certainly stand out in a crowd with their impeccable manicures, bulbous rings, cream pointy boots that have never seen a puddle (and that's just the players). The men have the healthy glow of fresh air and star jumps; the women shine from being routinely coated in tanning lotion.

Mandy, wife of Liverpool forward Nick Barmby, seems to be having a great weekend. Not just because of the free blow-dry at Michaeljohn's, but because her husband's team has just won 4-0. "Last night I had dinner at Nobu and ate Issey Miyake, and in a minute I'm going shopping in Nicole Ferrari," she says (I'm pretty sure she's joking).

These women are fed up with the public's perception of them. The footballers' edition of The Weakest Link didn't help the profession's image much, they say. One former England player, when asked the name of the actor who played Austin Powers, shouted "Lee Majors!"

"I don't sit at home taking cocaine all day and my husband doesn't beat me up," says Mandy, referring to recent plot lines in Footballers' Wives. Mind you, she's not bothered about the charity raffle later that day for a Mercedes sports car: "My husband has just given me a Mercedes CL500 Coupe!" she cries. "A late Christmas present."

Later, I bump into Tracey, girlfriend of Aston Villa midfielder Ian Taylor. She has a life away from football, running her own hair salon, opened (appropriately) by David Ginola. She and Ian marry in June - "I know, what was I thinking? The World Cup. No one will come." What does she think of the TV series?

"The wives can be very competitive when it comes to what they wear, what car they drive, the size of their diamonds," she says, eyeing the queue outside Bulgari. "But you can't buy style, can you?" Perhaps it's lucky Versace is closed. Like all the women I speak to, though, Tracey attends all home games and most of those away, although "lots of the wives look as if they are off to a wedding, not a footie match".

She agrees the turnout for the day's shopping is fantastic - Mr and Mrs Dion Dublin, the Trevor Sinclairs, Mrs Robbie Fowler and Mrs Emile Heskey - but thinks, considering the money they earn, footballers could do more. "Some of the players were moaning this morning that they had to fork out £250 each for a ticket for tonight's ball. I mean, come on."

Entitled the Night of Two Halves, the ball is held at the St Martin's Lane Hotel, ending with an auction that includes a customised E-type Jag, a stay at a Schrager hotel, and an Ungaro dress. It's been a wild success, for the charity and for the footballers' wives, who've bought themselves plenty of new designer gear. In the month that Sunderland's Niall Quinn announced he was giving the proceeds of his testimonial match to two local hospitals, this sort of charity work, combined with a little play, is surely a late-winner for football's image.

The footballers and their wives were shopping and partying in aid of the NSPCC's Full Stop campaign, raising more than £200,000 over two days. Participating shops - including Dunhill, Richard James, Donna Karan and Emanuel Ungaro - opened exclusively to the footballers and their wives and gave 10 per cent of the day's takings to the charity.