FIFA World Cup 2026 is in full swing across North America, and half the fun is happening off the pitch. Every time the camera finds a partner in the stands, the group chats light up, because the women the tabloids once filed under the word WAG have become some of the most followed faces of the whole tournament. The lovely thing is what sits underneath all the glamour: some really sweet love stories, the kind worth knowing.
So here is a warm look at some of the most loved up couples at this World Cup, and how each of them first got together. There are childhood sweethearts who grew up in the same tiny town, a shop floor meeting that grew into a proposal, and a first message sent by the girl who would go on to build a family with him. These are the football romances worth rooting for!
Photo: Courtesy of Erling Haaland,
Lionel Messi & Antonela Roccuzzo
Lionel Messi and Antonela Roccuzzo have loved each other almost their whole lives. They met as small children in Rosario, introduced by Antonela’s cousin, who happened to be Messi’s best friend, and even as a shy boy he was smitten.
Life pulled them apart when he moved to Spain as a teenager to chase football, yet they found their way back to each other as adults and never let go again. In June 2017 they married in their hometown in front of around 260 guests, a celebration the Argentine press called the wedding of the century, with Antonela in a soft Rosa Clará gown. Three sons later, she is still the first person he runs to on the pitch.
Photo: Courtesy of Antonela Roccuzzo
Erling Haaland & Isabel Haugseng Johansen
Erling Haaland and Isabel Haugseng Johansen have the most hometown love story of the bunch. Both grew up in the little Norwegian town of Bryne and came through the same local club, he in the boys’ academy and she as one of the standout players in the girls’ team. They knew each other as kids, although Haaland cheerfully admits he barely remembers it, and the romance only began years later, in 2021, when Isabel sent the first message.
He calls it fate, and loves that she understands football as deeply as he does. Haaland himself has become this tournament’s favorite comedian along the way, turning his own viral sprinting memes into jokes on his Snapchat and Instagram stories and roasting his own late winning goal against Ivory Coast before anyone else could. That same warmth is exactly what fans love about him and Isabel as a pair. Now parents to a baby son, they spend their downtime cooking, playing Minecraft together and ordering kebabs back home in Bryne, and Haaland has joked he would happily serve those same kebabs at their wedding one day.
Photo: Courtesy of Erling Haaland
Cristiano Ronaldo & Georgina Rodríguez
Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez began with the kind of meeting that belongs in a film. Back in 2016 she was working as a sales assistant at a Gucci store in Madrid when he walked in, and she has since described it as love at first sight. He used to wait outside the shop for her in his flashiest cars, and a quiet romance grew from there into a family of five children.
In August 2025, after nearly nine years together, he proposed with an enormous oval diamond, and Georgina shared the ring online with the words yes, I do. The sweetest part, by his own telling, came when their little daughters wandered in mid proposal and asked if daddy was really asking mummy to marry him.
Photo: Courtesy of Georgina Rodríguez
Harry Kane & Katie Goodland
Harry Kane and Katie Goodland are proof that some people really do marry their first love. They met as kids at a primary school in East London, stayed close through the same secondary school, and went to their school prom together at sixteen. Kane has often said how lucky he feels to have a childhood sweetheart who knew him long before any of the fame arrived. He proposed on a beach in the Bahamas in 2017, they married in a private ceremony in 2019, and he announced it online by simply saying he had married his best friend. He even tapes over his wedding ring during matches so that nothing ever happens to it.
Photo: Courtesy of Katie Goodland
Bukayo Saka & Tolami Benson
Bukayo Saka and Tolami Benson kept their romance beautifully low key for years before the world caught on. They started dating around 2020, and most fans only noticed Tolami when she cheered him on at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Somewhere along the way Saka gave her a puppy as a Valentine’s gift, the two of them quietly becoming their own little family.
In late 2025 he planned a careful, romantic proposal at a London hotel and surprised her with a ring. They shared the news in a set of soft black and white photos, and the internet promptly melted. Tolami has since been crowned the new face of WAG culture in her own right, with fashion press pointing to her effortless mix of designer pieces and high street basics, and a fast growing following that watches her every match day look almost as closely as they watch the football.
Photo: Courtesy of Tolami Benson
Frenkie de Jong & Mikky Kiemeney
Frenkie de Jong and Mikky Kiemeney are another pair of high school sweethearts, together since their teenage years in a small Dutch town around 2014. She was a serious field hockey player back then, and she has stood beside him through every step from Ajax to Barcelona to the Dutch national team.
He proposed in the summer of 2022 while the two were away travelling, telling the world he could not wait to spend the rest of their lives together. They married in an intimate private ceremony in 2024, kept softly out of the spotlight, and today they share two children.
Photo: Courtesy of Mikky Kiemeney
Kevin De Bruyne & Michèle Lacroix
Kevin De Bruyne and Michèle Lacroix owe their whole marriage to a single tweet. Back in 2014, when De Bruyne was still a young player out on loan and barely famous, Michèle liked one of his posts on Twitter, and he was far too shy to message her himself, so a friend grabbed his phone and did it for him. They spent months getting to know each other by text before they ever met, and everything fell into place from there.
He proposed in front of the Eiffel Tower in 2016, they married in the Italian coastal town of Sorrento in 2017, and he still calls her his best friend and the person who changed his life. Three children later, she is the calm at the centre of it all.
Photo: Courtesy of Michèle Lacroix
Lautaro Martínez & Agustina Gandolfo
Lautaro Martínez and Agustina Gandolfo met the way plenty of great stories start, at a party with the right people in the room. It was 2018, back in Argentina, and a mutual friend introduced them, with Lautaro later saying it was love at first sight. Agustina, a model and entrepreneur from Mendoza, packed up her life to follow him to Italy when he joined Inter Milan, and the two built everything from there.
They married in 2023 in a glamorous lakeside ceremony in northern Italy, surrounded by his Argentina teammates, and they now share a daughter and a son. She is a fixture in the stands, usually with the little ones beside her.
Photo: Courtesy of Agustina Gandolfo
Ousmane Dembélé & Rima Edbouche
Ousmane Dembélé and Rima Edbouche wrote perhaps the most private love story in the entire tournament. The two have been together since his early years at Rennes, and they guarded that relationship so closely that even his teammates at Barcelona had no idea he was in love, right up until the day he married her. In 2021 they held a traditional Moroccan wedding, and the world only learned about it once photos from the ceremony quietly surfaced online.
Rima, who wears the hijab and runs her own modest fashion label, has stayed almost entirely out of the spotlight since, and Dembélé has credited her steady, quiet support with helping him through the hardest, most doubted years of his career. Their daughter arrived in 2022, and the family still keeps nearly everything about their life together just for themselves.
Photo: Courtesy of Rima Edbouche
Marc Cucurella & Claudia Rodríguez
Marc Cucurella and Claudia Rodríguez have been a team since 2018, back when he was coming up through Barcelona’s youth ranks. Claudia, who works in communications and design, has followed his career from Spain to England and back, moving cities each time and raising their three children along the way. She is fiercely in his corner too. After a pundit criticised Marc before Euro 2024, she waited until Spain beat England in the final, then posted a photo of him holding the trophy with the caption “How was your night, Gary?” Quiet loyalty like that tends to say more than any grand gesture.
Photo: Courtesy of Claudia Rodríguez
Riyad Mahrez & Taylor Ward
Riyad Mahrez and Taylor Ward have built one of football’s most joyfully public love stories, and this tournament might be the most meaningful chapter yet, with Mahrez calling it his last World Cup and scoring his first ever World Cup goals in Algeria’s dramatic draw with Austria. He and Taylor started dating in 2020, and he proposed in Mykonos the following year with a custom made ring.
What followed was less a wedding than a whole season of them, a Nikah ceremony in early 2022, a legal ceremony in London the next year, and a three day celebration on the shores of Lake Como in 2024 complete with a Leona Lewis performance. Taylor, who has built her own following of more than three million alongside a jewellery line, shares glimpses of their life together with real warmth, from Mila, their daughter, to the family they are still growing.
Photo: Courtesy of Taylor Ward
Federico Valverde & Mina Bonino
Federico Valverde and Mina Bonino started with a comment and a leap of faith. Mina, an Argentine sports journalist a few years older than him, left a message on one of his posts in 2019, the two got talking, and before long she flew to Madrid to meet a man whose voice she had never even heard. She has laughed since about how nervous she was at the airport, not quite sure who she was looking for.
The nerves clearly settled, because they married in 2022 and now have three little ones. Mina remains his loudest and funniest supporter, once joking online that his best form always seems to arrive whenever she is pregnant.
Photo: Courtesy of Mina Bonino
