Aren’t you glad I’ve let you come on?” Coleen Rooney jokes to her husband Wayne as they sit down for a joint interview in their new Disney+ show, The Real Rooneys. The subtext is pretty clear, here and in the rest of the series. While the football prodigy’s fame once drastically eclipsed that of his wife, now it’s Coleen whose star is firmly in the ascendancy.
Indeed, Coleen’s new focus on her career, after spending more than a decade as a stay-at-home mum to the couple’s four sons, is a major throughline for The Real Rooneys. We see her striking a deal for a lucrative fashion collaboration with Primark, rumoured to be worth millions of pounds, though of course the exact numbers aren’t crunched when the cameras are running – that might be a bit too “real”. We watch as she films adverts for PaddyPower with Danny Dyer. “Coleen’s stock is getting stronger by the day,” one of their associates notes proudly.
And what of Wayne while all this is happening? As the series opens, his sporting career has reached something of a nadir; he has just been sacked as manager by Plymouth Argyle after just seven months, despite signing a three-year deal. Shortly before that, he managed just 83 days and 15 games in charge at Birmingham City until parting ways with the club.
For the first time in his working life, this record-smashing player is floundering. “We spoke about her doing more work, not me getting sacked,” Wayne quips when one of the film crew asks about their respective careers (he says it with a self-deprecating grin; you don’t get the impression that he remotely resents their diverging fortunes).
With Coleen apparently now the main breadwinner (not that they’re exactly scrabbling round the back of the immaculate white sofas for cash – their Cheshire mega-mansion is a sight to behold), Wayne will have much more time to spend with Kai, 16, Klay, 13, Kit, 10, and Cass, eight – or so the rationale goes. But what emerges instead is a more realistic depiction of where the mental load still falls when a woman goes back to work.
Wayne and Coleen have known each other since they were 12, when their paths crossed growing up in Croxteth, Liverpool, but they didn’t start dating until they were 16; the latter’s strict parents Colette and Tony McLoughlin (who make cameos in The Real Rooneys as considerably more laidback grandparents) told them that they’d have to sit on opposite sides of the cinema for their first ever date, she revealed in her 2023 autobiography.
When tabloid journalists realised that Wayne, the teenage wunderkind signed to his childhood club Everton, had a girlfriend, they’d send photographers to lie in wait for her on her way to school, snapping photos of a disorientated Coleen wearing her puffa coat. You can only imagine how intimidating this must have been for a 16-year-old girl about to sit her GCSEs, who never really asked to be famous.
Around the time that the couple married in Portofino, Italy in 2008, Coleen had tried her hand at a few media projects, including the ITV series Coleen’s Real Women, in which she’d help to cast “ordinary” women in modelling campaigns, and the wedding photos ended up in OK! magazine (earning them a rumoured £2.5 million). But you always got the impression that she was ill at ease with the celebrity circus and, later, that she was happier bringing up her family out of the spotlight, staying relatively close to her family and friends in the North West even when Wayne signed to Manchester United.
In The Real Rooneys, she explains that part of the reason she opted to keep a comparatively low profile compared to other WAGs (not that she uses that acronym – it’s a term that she hates) is because all that early media coverage knocked her confidence considerably. In fact, practically the only time she would appear in the media was when Wayne’s various indiscretions and allegations of infidelity made headlines, like when the Sunday Mirror reported in 2010 that he had slept with a sex worker while Coleen was pregnant with their first child.
“When things have happened, the public have wanted it to just go, split, you know, that’s it, split them up,” she reflected in 2024, looking back at the response to those scandals. “But the fact is, there’s always been love still there.”
The clear affection between the two is on display in The Real Rooneys. But back then, the “stand by your man” approach prompted Coleen to be painted as a bit of a doormat. All that changed, though, with the “Wagatha Christie” scandal.
In 2019, Coleen shared a now-infamous tweet in which she explained that she had carefully orchestrated a social media sting operation, in which she had posted faked stories to her private Instagram account in order to try and work out who was sharing those titbits with the papers. In a sensational and much-memed reveal, she accused a culprit: “It’s………. Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
Her fellow WAG, the wife of Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy, eventually took her to court. But Coleen emerged victorious in both the 2022 legal battle and the war of public opinion. Her no-nonsense, straight-talking approach was irresistible (plus, frankly, coming out of the pandemic, we all needed the frivolous distraction).
And the whole affair opened up plenty of opportunities for the UK’s super-sleuth-in-chief, including a Disney+ three-parter focused on the court case and a stint on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. All of this laid the foundations for Coleen’s comeback, as documented in The Real Rooneys.
While Coleen may be killing it in her professional life, she is also still working just as hard at home;
But what the show also – perhaps accidentally – highlights is that while Coleen may be killing it in her professional life, she is also still working just as hard at home; for all the chat about Wayne becoming a house husband, the lion’s share of the domestic labour still seems to fall on her shoulders. “She takes care of everything, which allows me to mess around a bit more with the kids,” Wayne observed of their dynamic in a recent Guardian interview.
She is the one laying out the children’s school clothes and sports kits the night before, the one who tends to marshall the quartet of boys out of the door to school or football training in the morning, while Wayne enjoys a lie in (“he’s a slow and steady kind of guy,” one of their friends notes). Even their 10-year-old son Kit – who seems like the family’s resident comedian – regales his dad with a sarcastic “Good boy!” when he manages to dish them up some Weetabix.
That’s not to say that Wayne comes across badly – in fact, his presence in this doc is just the latest step in his “Waynaissance” rebrand. Since leaving management behind, he has been carving out a successful niche as a straight-talking football pundit, with a level of insight and wit that’s blitzed the cruel jibes that have dogged him throughout his playing career – that he was somehow uneducated or stupid, just because he didn’t finish school in order to focus on his sport.
Wayne 2.0 is funny, charming and winningly prepared to cut through the pleasantries of broadcasting (like when he branded the World Cup closing ceremony “crap” live on air back in July, surely voicing just about every viewer’s thoughts in the process). As well as cropping up as a contributor on Match of the Day and during the BBC’s World Cup coverage, he’s hosted a podcast for the broadcaster – which we see him launch during The Real Rooneys – and now has a Man United podcast too, titled Stick to United.
But all this success means that he is hardly the stay-at-home dad that the show initially tries to set him up as being – and that seems to mean that Coleen defaults to picking up the slack when it comes to domestic life and childcare.
Even when the work is ostensibly Wayne’s, she is the one who has to rush round ensuring that everything runs smoothly. It all makes you wonder whether this newly rebranded Wayne could even exist without Coleen slogging away steadily in the background, her beloved diary in hand.
Later in the series, there’s a scene that speaks volumes, when the podcast crew, co-presenters and guests turn up to record an episode at the couples’ home, with Coleen apparently having little to no idea of whether this is going to be a regular occurrence, or when this gang are next scheduled to arrive; she seems understandably stressed by the idea of a bunch of broadcasters turning up without her being able to prepare.
In another episode, we see the weight of it all catching up with her during a tearful conversation with her friend Danielle. “To be honest with you, I’m struggling at the minute as well, just fitting things in,” she admits, before noting: “It’s just a bit hard juggling everything.” It feels like an understatement.
And while Coleen will certainly enjoy a cushion of privilege that other working mums will not, it is stark to see how even wealth and celebrity doesn’t stop the domestic burden from defaulting onto the female partner.
So for all this series tries to spin us a triumphant story about Coleen’s second act, it ends up inadvertently showing us a much more nuanced one – about the unspoken and, quite frankly, brutal expectations we’re still placing on women.
