America is no stranger to high-profile tabloid relationships between athletes and celebrities, with actresses, models, and reality stars dating the likes of Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Lamar Odom, and Tom Brady. But there's one thing America doesn't have: WAGs.

I will freely admit to you that until I started reading up for this article, my knowledge of all things WAG consisted of the fact that Victoria Beckham is considered one and that there used to be a British show called Footballers' Wives which featured a character whose actual name was Chardonnay. And that's...well, that's pretty much it. My lack of WAG knowledge can be chalked up to a national pop-cultural detachment: the lives of WAGs (the wives and girlfriends of England's soccer stars), the source of so much tabloid fodder in the UK, have never really had a huge impact on this side of the sea, due mostly to the fact that Americans, aside from this recent bout of World Cup Mania, continue to shrug in the face of the rest of the world's collective futbol madness.

It's a bit amusing, then, that the drama of WAGs seems so custom made for the American trash-tv audience. They are, in many ways, The Real Housewives Of Soccer, and they have become so notorious in England over the past ten or so years that they've actually been banned from this year's World Cup, due to the fact that they've become such a distraction. So who are they? Let's take a look.