Remember Baden Baden, when we thought the Wags had reached their absolute nadir in flashy bad taste that gleefully turned back the clock on feminism? Well, just when you think your opinion of footballers and their consorts could sink no lower, the little tinkers go and prove you wrong.

To recap, Baden Baden was when the world watched transfixed as Alex Curran and Coleen McLoughlin valiantly attempted to deflect attention from their menfolk's disastrous performances on the pitch and Carly Zucker's irritatingly flat tummy by waving Chloé handbags and diamond solitaire pendants in front of every camera for miles. The Wag, as defined by Victoria Beckham, can be imagined graphically as the point in the pop-cultural universe where Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney intersects with the Stepford Wives.

Well, Mrs B must have been spitting in front of the telly on Tuesday night. (Assuming, that is, that the Beckham household still watches Manchester United games. One imagines that they might have found it Healthier To Move On, as they say in California.) Nereida Gallardo, a 24-year-old model from Mallorca and the current girlfriend of Cristiano Ronaldo, was sporting earrings with R7 spelt out in diamonds, a reference to her boyfriend's name and the number on his shirt.

To fully appreciate the morbid genius of these earrings, let us compile a short list of Premiership footballers' favourite things: model girlfriends, personalised number plates and diamonds. Ronaldo has devised a way to put a personalised numberplate, in diamonds, on his model girlfriend. Never was there a more eloquent illustration of how dearly these women pay for their bounty: Ms Gallardo gets to wear five-carat diamonds, but she looks like branded cattle.

But let us not forget that Wags set trends. If anyone spies an impressionable teenage girl on the bus next week wearing a fake gold pendant reading "PETE x5776", then we can safely assume that this refers her boyfriend's office extension number, and that the world really is going to hell in a handcart.