Given her partner is footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and she has built her own £20 million fortune, fans of Georgina Rodriguez will be unsurprised by her luxury world of mansions, sports cars, yachts, designer clothes and expensive jewellery. Yet her life hasn’t always been so opulent.
Just seven years ago, Ms Rodriguez, then aged 20, had a far more frugal existence as an au pair in Bristol, earning only £125 a week, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
While working as a nanny, she took English and dance lessons and, despite her meagre wage, says today that the experience left her dreaming of a return to Britain.
The Spanish model’s circumstances have certainly changed. After Ronaldo was signed by Manchester United this summer, she arrived in Cheshire with their brood of four children – plus two more on the way next year – to find her neighbours now include the likes of Wayne Rooney, Raheem Sterling and Harry Maguire.
Given her partner is footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and she has built her own £20 million fortune, fans of Georgina Rodriguez will be unsurprised by her luxury world of mansions, sports cars, yachts, designer clothes and expensive jewellery
The Spanish model’s circumstances have certainly changed. After Ronaldo was signed by Manchester United this summer, she arrived in Cheshire with their brood of four children – plus two more on the way next year – to find her neighbours now include the likes of Wayne Rooney, Raheem Sterling and Harry Maguire
The 27-year-old is now being billed as the next ‘super WAG’ – a term coined by those in football circles for wives or girlfriends such as Victoria Beckham, who are megastars in their own right. For not only is Ms Rodriguez about to star in a rags-to-riches fly-on-the-wall Netflix series about her life, but she is increasingly being targeted by British brands happy to pay vast sums for her to promote their products to her millions of fans.
Sources close to Ms Rodriguez – who is Spain’s most-followed woman on social media, with a range of international deals from Shegum make-up to Swiss cosmetic brand Gisada and Italian bikini firm Effek – say she is utterly set on cracking Britain.
In the UK, she will look to build on deals with Manchester-based fashion brand Pretty Little Thing – part of the Boohoo empire – and UK-based yoga company Alo Yoga. She has also started writing her Instagram posts in English rather than Spanish (or at least penning them in both languages).
Fashion designers clamour to dress Georgina, and jewellers lend her diamonds
Fashion designers such as Gucci are clamouring to dress her and luxury jewellers Chopard are lending her their diamonds in the knowledge that their brand will receive sought-after exposure on Ms Rodriguez’s prized Instagram page.
Meanwhile, the editors of British glossy magazines are hatching plans to make her a cover star in 2022 – a move long seen as a celebrity gateway to becoming a household name.
One fashion insider said: ‘Don’t be surprised if you see Georgina in Vogue at some point next year. She is beautiful, has a great story to tell and, more than anything, she is someone people are really beginning to talk about.’
Ms Rodriguez features on the cover of this month’s Spanish edition of Cosmopolitan. Wearing a pink sequinned dress, she attributes karma to bringing her together with Ronaldo, saying: ‘I firmly believe in destiny but even more in karma. What you give, you receive.’
The 27-year-old is now being billed as the next ‘super WAG’ – a term coined by those in football circles for wives or girlfriends such as Victoria Beckham, who are megastars in their own right
To craft an image that will appeal to the British public, Ms Rodriguez has even recruited Caroline McAteer, a London-based publicist who launched Brand Beckham in the late 1990s alongside Posh and Becks’ manager, Simon Fuller, and who also works with Frank Lampard, Jack Grealish and Ronaldo.
The model’s impeccable WAG credentials were on display on Thursday night when she posted an Instagram video of the ‘gender reveal’ event for her unborn twins.
The couple’s four children – Cristiano Jr, Eva, Mateo and Alana – learned that their new siblings are a boy and a girl after popping open two balloons to find one filled with blue confetti and the other pink.
She was a normal young woman whose life changed dramatically
The backdrop to the video was a perfectly decorated Christmas tree and a huge white spiral staircase at the family’s £3 million Cheshire mansion. Ms Rodriguez also posted a picture on Instagram of Cristiano Jr, Eva and Mateo (Ronaldo’s children by an American surrogate) and Alana – who is Ms Rodriguez’s daughter with the footballer – on a visit to Lapland to see Father Christmas.
Meanwhile, rumours of reported tension between Ms Rodriguez and her potential future mother-in-law have evaporated. In an interview with a Portuguese magazine, Ronaldo’s mother Dolores Aveiro, who may join the family for Christmas, said: ‘She is a good girl and a great support for Cristiano.’
Ms Rodriguez met Ronaldo, 36, five years ago while working as a shop assistant in a Gucci store in Milan.
Born in Buenos Aires, Ms Rodriguez moved to Spain with father Jorge, who was jailed for cocaine trafficking in 2003 when she was just nine. He was handed an 11-year jail term and was released in 2013. After her father went to prison, Ms Rodriguez lived a modest life with her mother María Hernández and sister Ivana, who has herself become an Instagram star.
As a youngster, Ms Rodriguez recalled, she would often help her elderly neighbours do their shopping.
The model’s impeccable WAG credentials were on display on Thursday night when she posted an Instagram video of the ‘gender reveal’ event for her unborn twins
Even today, despite enjoying the trappings of fame and fortune, she helps impoverished young women who want to leave home and study to ‘find their dreams and achieve their goals’.
Alvaro Diaz, the director of entertainment for Netflix Spain, says the upcoming show featuring the model is ‘aspirational’, pointing to how Ms Rodriguez went from selling designer clothing to wearing her own on red carpets. ‘She was a normal young woman whose life changed dramatically one day,’ he said.
‘She was leaving work one day and crossed paths with the love of her life. Who has not dreamed of that?’
Netflix had planned to screen the series before Christmas, but Ronaldo’s move from Turin – where he played for Juventus – to the UK in September provided the producers with rich extra material.
The documentary will now go into much more detail about the couple’s move to Britain and how they settled after Ronaldo returned to Old Trafford 18 years after he first arrived there as an teenage sensation. Crucially, that should ramp up the appeal to Ms Rodriguez’s new British market.
The documentary will also follow Ms Rodriguez as she attends the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix and cheers on Ronaldo at last summer’s Euros tournament. Some of the footballer’s private life will be shown on screen, but according to sources he plays only a bit part.
‘There will be plenty of private jets,’ says one insider.
‘It will be dripping with glamour but there will also be the odd meltdown. Georgina will be giving the full lowdown of what her life is really like, there will be ups and downs of motherhood.’ Sources said the show will also address Ms Rodriguez’s fears that her wedding day may never come. Ronaldo reportedly proposed to her in 2018 with a diamond ring estimated to be worth £615,000, but the couple are yet to set a date.
Which sounds like just the sort of cliff-hanger to tee up a second Netflix series to make Ms Rodriguez the new WAG to rule them all.