Nicola Tappenden was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, living in Croydon, when a psychic told her she'd grow up to do something very special. She would marry a professional footballer. At the time, she had a crush on a youth team player – "I fancied the pants off him; I think I might have snogged him once" – so she confided in her mother that she thought it might be him. It wasn't.

Then Tappenden left school, won a competition to become a Page 3 girl, and met the then West Ham United player Bobby Zamora. "Two of my friends had stayed at his house, so they invited me over," she says. "He got in from football, and he was like, 'Oh my God! When I left there were two Page 3 girls in my house, and now there are three!'"

Tappenden and Zamora started ­dating but again, the relationship didn't work out. Then she met Simon Walton, a "journeyman" footballer who has had spells at nine ­different clubs in six years, in a branch of Nando's, and they went on a date. ­Fifteen months ago, the pair had a baby girl, Poppy, and now they're engaged. That psychic's ­prediction should soon come true.

Tappenden is living many young girls' dream. She's a kind, appealing woman – chatting openly about ­everything from her PMT to her ­worries about being a good mother – and I believe her completely when she says that she didn't date Zamora for the publicity. But she admits it raised her profile: she appeared on TV shows ­including WAGs Boutique and Celebrity Big Brother, began an online ­clothing business, and is now bringing out a single, Drunk.

And yet, when I ask if she could recommend being a footballer's ­girlfriend, Tappenden says no. "The money is great for those lads . . . but if you could get the same amount and have a nine-to-five job, I'd say fuck the football. And I'm telling you now, if anything ever happens between me and Simon, I'll never look at another footballer . . . I think it's a bit of a curse on a relationship."

Cheryl Cole and Toni Terry might well agree. The past few weeks have cast an ugly light on the lot of a ­footballer's wife, starting with the ­allegations of John Terry's affair with Vanessa Perroncel – the former ­partner of his England team-mate Wayne Bridge and friend of his wife, Toni. This isn't the first time Terry has ­apparently cheated. There have been many other allegations over the years ­involving a cast of glamour models.

The Terry scandal has been ­followed, in the past few days, by ­stories that naked pictures of the ­Chelsea and England defender Ashley Cole have been texted from Cole's phone to that of a topless model. He claims a friend of a friend was responsible for sending them, but it's not the first time he has faced allegations of sexual impropriety – specifically, a night with a hairdresser behind the back of his pop star wife, Cheryl.

In fact, footballers can seem a ­singularly priapic bunch, unable to walk past a glamour model without propositioning her for a threesome. And yet, in recent years, ­marrying a footballer has become highly ­aspirational for some young women. Surveys confirm it is seen as a career option by a minority; and that many girls can name more wives and girlfriends of footballers than female politicians. There is also a lighthearted group on Facebook called When I grow up I want to be a WAG, and an instructional book called WAG Don't ­Wannabe: How to Date Footballers – and Survive!

But the living, breathing proof is the women in bars and clubs who try to pay bouncers to point out all the ­players. A member of staff at Newz, a ­Liverpool bar that's popular with many of the city's highly paid footballers, says that "even when a reserve team player ­arrives, the girls go completely wild: they're all over him. It's ridiculous. You really have to see it to believe it."

Of course Wags, the ­acronym used to describe the wives and girlfriends of footballers, is a sexist slap in the face; an appellation that underlines their status as adjuncts to their ­husbands: accessories, appendages. By the 21st century, we might have ­expected the idea of women being ­defined by their male partners to have died – along with the idea of marriage as a career path. And yet, when it comes to the Wag obsession, we seem to have regressed many decades. As the feminist writer Natasha Walter says, "There's a really worrying hierarchy in the newspapers: that to be the wife is better than to be the girlfriend, and to be the wife of the more successful footballer is ­better than to be the wife of the less successful footballer. It's like an 18th- or early 19th-century idea of the woman being given value by her ­relationship with the man, and the more successful he is, the more ­valuable she is."

When it comes to pinpointing the appeal of marrying a footballer, the short answer that's always given, of course, is money. This attraction flourished in 1992 with the birth of the Premier League, when footballers' fees rose hugely. And then there's the status: traditionally, the wives and girlfriends of players have been fairly anonymous, but in 2006, when the partners of the England team ­descended on Baden-Baden for the World Cup, the term Wag was embraced by the media with zeal; coverage of their every move was extensive, and suddenly these women were stars. Steven Gerrard's partner, Alex Curran, brought out her own ­perfume and a weekly ­newspaper ­column; Wayne Rooney's partner, Coleen, ­published her autobiography and appeared in Vogue.

The scene in Baden-Baden – the sunbathing, shopping, drinking and dancing on tables – looked such a laugh that Alison Kervin, a sports writer, decided to begin a series of novels based on the Wags (the next, due out in May, is Wags at the World Cup). Their stories, she thought, represented a modern fairytale. "If you're a manicurist earning £15,000 a year, you could go into a nightclub and, in a Cinderella-style moment, meet your Prince Charming and your life would be changed for ever. You'd have more money, every day, than you'd have had in years. You'd have the castle on the hill. You'd be a style icon."

But when Kervin began her ­research, a different story emerged. She spoke to a number of Wags, and says she "came away almost in tears, because I just felt desperately sorry for them . . . Some of those I met found it very, very difficult living in somebody else's shadow."

One woman told Kervin that fans would open the door for her husband to walk through, then slam it in her face; that taxi drivers would take her husband's bags and leave her to struggle. "All the normal rules of etiquette and behaviour are out of the window, because he's famous and needs to be looked after," Kervin explains. "She was nothing. She said she wanted to get a T-shirt printed with 'Don't ask about my husband's football ­career without saying "hello"' because people were always charging up to her and saying, 'Where is he? What's he doing?'"

Many aspects of Wags' lives bring to mind a sort of 1950s womanhood: they seem to be expected to come when called and, equally, to stay away when they're not wanted. (There was the ­notorious Manchester United Christmas party in 2007, when the Wags were apparently told to stay at home, 100 handpicked women were brought in to party with the players, and the night ended with a rape allegation that was later dropped.)

The women face isolation and upheaval, says Kervin, as their partners move from club to club and they either follow them, and lose established friendships, or stay put, and live apart from their partners. Tappenden is well-versed in this problem – it's what she finds most stressful. Her fiance, Walton, has moved clubs a lot recently, "and you don't know whether you're coming or going. I couldn't keep doing it, so now we're living separate lives practically." Tappenden is in Epsom Downs, while Walton is in Crewe, "and I wouldn't wish that on anybody. I find it really, really difficult."

Jadene Bircham, the wife of former QPR player Marc Bircham, concurs: "It's a long hard slog being married to a footballer," she says. "They're out continuously. Their job is their life. It's lonely: a lot of weddings, ­christenings, birthday parties are on ­Saturdays, so they can't go because they're ­playing football . . . That's always their first priority."

And alone in the house, the Wags face the fear that another woman may be targeting their husband, that he will be the next player to jump from newspapers' back pages to the front. Nicola Smith, who dated Teddy Sheringham for eight years, says the attention the players get is extraordinary; that women "parade in front of the boys in bars, walk up and down five or six times, looking them in the eye, even when their girlfriends are sitting next to them . . . I was actually attacked once by a girl who was doing that; she tried to hit me, but Teddy and the bouncers got between us."

Nicola Tappenden with her then-partner Bobby Zamora. She says: "I think football is a bit of a curse on a relationship." Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Tappenden completely trusts her current partner, but says that when Zamora's team, West Ham, went up to the Premier League because of a goal he'd scored, "Something flicked in my brain. He was the goldenballs and I just couldn't cope with it. I thought, 'Girls are going to throw themselves at him,' and I became obsessed – a psycho girlfriend. He didn't give me any reason not to trust him, but when he walked out of the room I'd look at his phone, I'd try to find out information about him. I just got really insecure."

Perhaps as a result of this paranoia, Wags are often enormously careful about their looks. Bircham says that in the 12 years she's been with her husband, she's never seen a single ­"ungroomed footballer's wife. Not one. All of them have always looked the ­picture of perfection."

"They're judged constantly on their looks," Kervin agrees. "There are worst-dressed Wag features in the papers; there's the fact that the young girls who are so predatory around these men tend to be exceptionally pretty 16-year-olds. And I also think there are more psychological issues at play. The women I met didn't know when they were going to see their husbands, where they were going to be living next year, how much he was going to be earning. And they also knew that if he has an injury, it's all over. They're totally powerless. I got the sense that some felt the only power they had was making themselves as perfect as they could ­humanly be – not even humanly, in fact; they'd have various operations. If they were the image of perfection, and if the house was immaculate, then they'd done all they could do."

There is a particular Wag aesthetic that has developed, and Kervin says she has often pondered why this is. "The Barbie doll look – where did that come from? You'd think they'd need to assert their individuality, but they all look very similar. Orange tan. Very, very pretty. Very, very thin. And all wearing similar clothes."

One answer seems to be that – ­consciously or not – the women know their role is to boost their partner's masculinity. The Wag style, with its manicured nails, high heels, huge false eyelashes and tiny dresses, is as feminised as it can possibly be – underlining these women's status as possessions, part of the package for footballers. Kervin once interviewed the England striker Peter Crouch; and in reply to the question "If you hadn't been a footballer, what would you have been?", he answered "a virgin". As well as showing an attractive self-deprecation, his quip underlines the fact that girls are ­considered one of the rewards of being a top sportsman.

When Walter was researching her new book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, she flicked through a lads' magazine and there was "a Wags feature, where they had as many ­photographs of wives and girlfriends of footballers as they could find, either in glamour model poses – because a lot of them have done that kind of thing – or on the beach in bikinis. All the focus was on their bodies, the size of their breasts. It was like photographing a car or a house. The message was that if you're a successful sportsman, you get access to these kinds of objects. I just thought that was horrible."

So why, in the 21st century, when women's options are supposedly as limitless and varied as they've ever been, would anyone seek power, ­status or wealth through marriage? The answer, Walter suspects, is that the possibilities for working-class women are still highly constrained. "They're going into this world of glamour ­modelling ­because it's the only route they can see to wealth and success, and the Wag culture is bound up with that. No one looks at the fact that our society isn't giving the opportunities and aspirations to young women that it does to young men, and particularly to women with fewer options and less education."

The options are limited for working-class men too, of course, but they do at least have some credible paths to ­extreme wealth, if that's what they want. They can go into the money markets: a highly male-dominated industry. Or they can dream of being a footballer – at any one time there are around 4,000 professional footballers in England and Wales, ­although since the birth of the Premier League many more of them are from overseas.

Those that do succeed in our ­national game become local and potentially national icons – the 50ft banner for John Terry that appears at every Chelsea home game reads: "JT, ­captain, leader, legend." "They're a hero," says Walter, "whereas the women are ­despised. They might get some kind of status, but they also get nasty, misogynistic press at the same time."

The icons and images at the heart of a culture tell us an enormous amount about its values. It's interesting to note which images of women have multiplied over the last five years: an increasing sexualisation, and a media obsession with women in turmoil (Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Anna Nicole Smith).

The Wags are a part of this wider culture. It's not their fault – very often, the couples are childhood sweethearts who would have stayed together had he been a plumber, a plasterer or a teacher. It is the media that has chosen to describe them as Wags and define them by their marital status. But the idea is thus reinforced that women can never be heroes in their own right. If the obsession with Wags represents one thing, it's surely a means of putting women firmly back in their place.

Still, at least many people do realise that being a Wag isn't all it's cracked up to be. I drop by an event in Liverpool, where women are being offered a free lip treatment, and watch as a young woman in tracksuit bottoms and false eyelashes has 10 injections in her top lip, the beautician wiping away pinpricks of blood as she goes. The young woman is a cleaner who has come for the procedure with her mother. After they've both had it done, they speak to me through numb mouths, only their bottom lips moving.

"Would you like your daughter to be a Wag?" I ask, and her mother shakes her head. "They're all cheats, aren't they," says her daughter. "Why would you want to go out with someone like that?"

I move on to another woman who's waiting for the injections. "Do you know anyone who wants to be a Wag?" I ask. "Oh no, not at all," she says, and I smile widely. Not for long. "All the women I know want to be like Jordan."

• Do you think the media are too hard on Wags?