“Nostalgia Has Been a Lot Kinder to the WAG”: Trackie McLeod on Celebrating Football’s Campest Players

Sidestepping autobiographical work in favour of the football stars’ partners on the sidelines, the Scottish artist presents his latest exhibition MONEY. SUCCESS. FAME. GLAMOUR.

Playful, charming, and partial to pop culture excess, generational Glaswegian artist Trackie McLeod is all the rage. An Irn-Bru collab and James McAvoy cosign to his name, he’s amassed a cult following of over 38K on an Instagram full of nostalgia dumps. His crew cut, cheeky chappie self continues to capture the moment through sculptural showpieces and print parodies queering masculinity and probing class politics. Having spent the best of his blossoming years expressing his lived experience, he’s now turning his attention to football’s campest corner. At OOF Gallery, in the heart of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the 33-year-old’s new solo exhibition MONEY. SUCCESS. FAME. GLAMOUR. revisits the rise of the WAG, 20 years after Britain’s glitziest celebrities gripped the nation from the sidelines.

A self-declared “gay geezer”, McLeod has a weakness for wearing trainers with tuxedos, Britpop boys, and women who know how to work a designer Louis Vuitton handbag. The child of VH1 Classics and Tumblr, his nineties and noughties pop fixation is one of tabloid throwback and reality charm, raised on Footballers’ Wives and the glossy gossip pages of Heat Magazine. “Robbie Williams and Brian Harvey are definitely style icons to me,” he shares. “That era of 90s jack-the-lad style was tracksuits, dodgy haircuts, jewellery and pure bravado.”

Our chat takes place shortly after Field Maneuvers, where McLeod made the journey from Scotland to somewhere in Norfolk and spent a weekend away dancing beneath his own declaration of affection: a lightbox reading ‘Tell Your Mates You Love Them.’ Inspired by the warm, fogged glass and midcentury fonts of working men’s clubs, “Having it hanging above the DJ decks at the Function stage whilst dancing with your mates out your dish was a moment,” he recalls. “The festival has a pub called The Packed Inn, so it felt correct after UTOPIA for me to have a punt.” He’s referring to an ambitious pub installation which ran in February; a place for everyone, at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, that got people talking about class.

Growing up queer in the Glasgow suburb of Whiteinch, McLeod first found his stride with multimedia pop art projects that zeroed in on his working-class upbringing. Switching the play on lad culture, with all of its sticky sensibilities, his FRUIT and FRUIT II solo shows surveyed shame and the pressure to fit in by taking the piss out of toxic masculinity. Rooted in early 2000s references, each dry, sarcastic work was named after a woman who had shaped his life. A Burberry-check Nissan Micra; copper-clad homophobia headlines, mimicking the Scottish patter and humour so specific to McLeod’s identity.

His subsequent SOFT PLAY exhibition in the south of England transformed the gallery space into an interactive playground. Complete with swings, climbing frames and sound buttons, his recreation of community centres and parks shows that working-class youth spend time in toys with the idea of coming of age too early. Recognising the working men’s club as a vital space for connection and camaraderie, the success of UTOPIA has since taken McLeod’s intrigue in collective nostalgia to new heights.

Some of his best-known work is driven by a desire to educate the masses, to start conversations around respect, tolerance and acceptance. First came a Nokia-style summer billboard project displaying the message “Boys will be... what we teach them to be.” Perhaps his most pointed effort, last April’s GAY IF YE DON’T for Nuart Aberdeen – the free public street art festival – is a giant list of things that were considered ‘gay’ in school, painted onto a building facade for all to gaze at. To quote his viral Instagram reveal: “I think wee Trackie would be proud of this one. We’ve come a long way lad.”

His expanding practice still draws on familiar mischief, but McLeod is now looking beyond his own being, travelling back to a gloriously self-indulgent chapter in lived British history. “It’s something quite different for me,” he says of the departure. “A lot of my previous work has been autobiographical in some way. I’m looking outwards rather than inwards for a change, which is probably a good thing.” Arriving on the back of an increasingly prolific run, MONEY. SUCCESS. FAME. GLAMOUR. gets its title from the decadent Felix Da Housecat song, famously performed by a flamboyant Macaulay Culkin and Chloë Sevigny as NYC club kids in the 2003 film Party Monster.

Money, success and fame have long been football’s companions, though it is glamour that arrived in particularly conspicuous fashion when Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Nancy Dell’Olio took over the national discourse. During the 2006 World Cup, the wives and girlfriends of England’s football squad descended on the hotels, bars and boutiques of Baden-Baden, Germany. Overshadowing their partners with luxury shopping sprees and nights out in the spa town, commanding as much concentration as the games themselves. They became tabloid fodder, an overstated global media spectacle.

Two decades later, McLeod feels it's the right time for him to document the rise of the WAG and the culture that came with it: the glamour, the camp, and the complete ridiculousness of it all. “Football exhibitions tend to feel very male-focused and I’ve always been more interested in what’s happening off the pitch,” he explains. “Like most queer kids growing up, I was obsessed with pop culture. I blame the amazing selection of magazines in the foyer of the sunbed shop my mum used to work in. My favourite WAG moment was when Tanya Turner from Footballers’ Wives ended up in Bad Girls. This crossover contributed to my gayness.”

Across a dozen new works, McLeod imagines celebrity as a kind of modern religion. The cast of Footballers’ Wives as saints playing on DVD screens in the shape of a crucifix. Posh and Becks’ OK! wedding world-exclusive as scripture, a caricature cover story screenprinted on brass. Victoria Beckham “played the game like a pro.” She doubles as the Jesus to twelve WAG disciples; a scene of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper considers Baden-Baden as a weird site of paparazzo pilgrimage. “It’s a celebration of women. It’s also a critique of the media, the paparazzi and the public’s role in it all. As a nation we were completely obsessed with them, but at the same time they were constantly picked apart for what they wore, how they looked and how they behaved. I’m interested in that contradiction.”

The public scrutiny of the WAGs’ tabloid heyday stretches to the more recent, much-memed dispute of Wagatha Christie, the high-profile libel battle between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy. A Traitors-style, LV-branded wooden confessional booth invites visitors to take their place and pass judgement on the High Court transcript of Vardy v Rooney. It’s a temple of the senses, sprayed in Rooney’s Butterflies Eau de Toilette, turning McLeod’s supporters into participants in the sensationalist presentation that helped define the case.

And while football provides the backdrop, McLeod admits he doesn’t really have a personal connection to the support beyond his family following it. “I definitely tried and failed. I went to the after school club, I wore the boots and shirts and I got the T-shirt,” he concedes. “I’ve never really found an interest in the actual game, beyond the odd Scotland match. I think that’s probably allowed me to look at football from a different angle and make work about everything that happens around it, what it makes people think and feel.”

It’s a given that this distance didn’t simply disappear when childhood ended for McLeod, finding himself at odds with the expectations of macho environments. “Naturally, being a lamb to the slaughter in most sporting situations growing up, I did build up a bit of awkwardness around sport. I was shit in goals, so I’d be shit in the gym – that was the logic.” It’s a weight he’s carried for quite a long time, having to unpick it as he got older. “It was probably also tied into my need to be good at everything, which is a load of shite when it comes to looking after yourself. Working out and running came into my life at the right time.”

The family influence of McLeod’s work and stellar wardrobe is unshakable; he owes it all to his mum and her strong sense of personal style, never leaving the house without her “face on”. Even so, there is pride in adopting football attire. “Aye, one could say I have a penchant for sports and leisurewear, what was the giveaway? Mentally, I’m still in 2003. Footballers have cool haircuts, wear blingy earrings and St Tropez fake tan and dress like your lesbian aunt.” Footballers just aren’t homoerotic anymore. McLeod's exhibition flips all that on its head by not really addressing them at all and focusing on their wives instead.

Nostalgia has certainly softened the general public’s relationship with WAGs. What was once dismissed as tacky is classic by today’s standards; the era’s Y2K aesthetic enjoying a second life online. “I’ve lived long enough to see everything come back full circle, which is the worrying part of this story,” McLeod says. “It’s funny that a lot of the things these women were ripped apart for wearing are now considered iconic. I think nostalgia has been a lot kinder to the WAG than we were at the time. Up hun culture.”

Despite the distance, London’s OOF Gallery feels like the perfect home for the project. The world’s only contemporary gallery inside a football stadium, its wider programme and biannual magazine is dedicated to exploring the relationship between art and the sport. Even with a heavy workload, developing his show over last summer’s FIFA World Cup, McLeod managed to squeeze in some time to support Scotland: “The World Cup was class, we did a lot of drinking. I released a flag for everyone who’d never been to America but had been in some states. The highlight probably had to be the Haiti game. After we won, everyone spilled out of the pub at 5am, the sky was pink and someone was playing the bagpipes. I paid £57 for a six-minute taxi home. Biblical.”

For a public-facing persona navigating a competitive art world that feeds on nepotism and privilege, popularity hasn’t necessarily made the path any clearer for McLeod. A DIY artist who’s had to take the road less travelled, he’s had to fund his own exhibitions in the past and slept on sofas to make ends meet. How are working class artists expected to overcome this insurmountable barrier? McLeod’s response is tentative. “I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer this because I’m still working it out myself.” Whether or not rich folk have treated him differently as his profile has grown, “I’ve learned not to expect too much support from the art world or galleries. I’m saying yes to everything, working hard and not letting the bastards grind me down.”

Such institutional resistance has long permeated McLeod’s politically charged creations. His 2022 piece Trainwreck ran into red tape around it being too controversial for exhibition in certain UK constituencies. A take on the 1996 poster for his favourite film, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, it's a mockery of the Tories, and Scotland’s relationship with Westminster. David Cameron in lieu of Ewan McGregor, Liz Truss as Kelly Macdonald, among others. “My poster makes more sense now than it did then,” he remarks. “The trainwreck never stopped. Could do a full series of them for the amount of prime ministers we’ve had since.”

In a time of austerity, energy bills, strikes and rising food bank stats, McLeod’s sharp observations made light of his chosen subjects. His clowning is not without bite, however; keeping alive an ongoing debate over who gets a say in his homeland’s future. Thirty years on from the film’s release, and Trainspotting’s unromantic Scotland still resonates. “It shows a side that does exist but doesn’t glamourise it, despite it often being accused of doing so. I don’t think anybody ever finished Trainspotting and thought, ‘I can’t wait to be an arsehole like Renton,’ then picked up a needle and spoon.”

Perpetually in motion, moving at a pace that seems to match his hungry appetite, McLeod is pressing ahead with a massive scale-up. This past year alone, “The production line got a lot faster, which doesn’t always feel constructive. The works got bigger, which is exciting. I’m definitely less scared of taking up space than I was a year ago.” He’s staying booked and busy, with another solo show after OOF at Dundee Contemporary Arts next April. “It’ll be good to be back exhibiting in Scotland, expect an element of fashion then... New York one day. A boy can dream.”

Until next time, McLeod is dead set on giving an often-overlooked corner of pop culture its flowers. And if fans leave his sports ground feeling a little more fabulous – rich, successful, famous, and glamorous – all the better. “Not too much to ask, is it?”

MONEY. SUCCESS. FAME. GLAMOUR. is on show at OOF Gallery until 26th February 2027.