It was early evening in the Oleander Bar at the Brenners Park Hotel in the pretty German spa town of Baden-Baden when Victoria Beckham came over to talk. The 2006 World Cup was still in its early stages and I was with Sam Wallace, now of The Telegraph, ordering a drink.I’d been covering David Beckham’s career for nine years by then and I’d met Victoria once before. You speak as you find and she was smart and funny. That evening, we talked for a short while about the tournament and the sometimes fraught relationship between players and journalists, and swapped a few pleasantries.After a few minutes, Cheryl Tweedy, who was soon to marry England left back Ashley Cole, came over. She asked Victoria if Sam and I were bothering her. Victoria said we weren’t. ‘Just as long as you know I’ve got your back,’ Ms Tweedy said and went back to her seat.That was what it was like following England at that World Cup 20 years ago. It was a bizarre and accidental social experiment in mixing sports journalists with the families of superstar footballers that has not been repeated since and never will be again.As England arrive in West Palm Beach, Florida, for the beginning of their attempt to win the World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada, the FA know they can use what happened in Baden-Baden as a template for how not to do it. A template for what to avoid at all costs.It was never supposed to have happened. A dozen or so of us, all newspaper sports journalists, had been booked into Brenners Park, a beautiful hotel on the edge of town, six months before the tournament. The Brenners Park Hotel in Baden-Baden, home in 2006 to the England players' partners and families... and the assorted British press pack (L-R, middle row) Brooklyn Beckham, Cheryl Tweedy and Victoria Beckham celebrate during England's 2006 World Cup campaign The WAGs outside the hotel with staff - they were never meant to be staying in the same place as journalists but it was all too late to changeSoon afterwards, the FA and Nancy Dell’Olio, the wife of then England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, decided that that was where they wanted the players’ wives and girlfriends to stay and made a block booking for them. When they discovered we were staying there, too, they asked the management to cancel our bookings. The management refused.And so the die was cast and we had front row seats for the birth of the WAG phenomenon. Hooliganism, which had dominated news coverage of major football tournaments for the previous 20 years, had been brought under control by banning orders. The WAGs strolled boldly into the space the thugs had vacated.I first became aware of the presence of the players’ families the morning after the England team arrived in Germany and set up camp in a hotel in a castle on top of a mountain 10 miles outside Baden-Baden, which is sandwiched between the Black Forest and the French border. I came down to the lobby to catch a cab to training to find a couple of young men engaged in a kind of rolling maul with two of the hotel’s liveried doormen.I have no idea what caused the confrontation but it broke up eventually and the two young men made their way up the stairs to their room. The doormen looked stunned. This was not what they had been trained to expect at their five-star establishment. The young men, it turned out, were friends or relatives of Jamie Carragher, the Liverpool defender, whose dad, Phil, was staying at the hotel.Phil is a character. He is larger-than-life. He is irrepressible. He is a walking whirl of utter chaos and unquenchable energy. He rode around Baden-Baden during that tournament on a bicycle and became a well-known figure in the town.He is not a stranger to mischief, either. At some point during the tournament, he was photographed on the terrace at the back of Brenners Park attempting an impersonation of a Nazi soldier goose-stepping. The picture appeared on the front page of the newspaper I was working for at the time and so, when I got back from training that day, the hotel reception informed me that there was a message waiting, summoning me to the Carraghers’ room.I walked up there with a certain amount of trepidation and knocked on the door. Phil opened it and invited me in. The room had been transformed into a giant crash pad. It was wall-to-wall mattresses. A few people lay on them, crashed out. It was like a hangover recovery suite. Phil upbraided me gently about the photograph and then offered me a drink.I loved Phil’s company. The man’s a force of nature. But the Carraghers moved out soon after that. Some water was thrown from an upstairs room on to a group of diners having lunch on the terrace and the Carragher party took their leave. They moved to a bar with rooms a few hundred yards away that the rest of us christened the House of Scouse. The hotel was much the poorer without them. Beckham (left), a friend of the group (second left), Coleen Rooney (middle), Louise Owen (second right) and Elen Rivas (Frank Lampard's then-fiance, furthest right) head out for dinner For the most part, an uneasy truce existed between the journalists and the WAGs Frank Lampard relaxes around the pool at the Brenners Park HotelFor the most part, an uneasy truce existed between the journalists and the WAGs. The players would visit every so often and when they did, players, families and journalists would often congregate in the large downstairs television room to watch whatever match was on that evening.The players and their wives and girlfriends sat in a big semi-circle around one side of the television and the journalists sat in a big semi-circle around the other side of it. Generally, it was the same by the pool. If we had time to sit out there, we’d be on one set of sun loungers, the players’ families would be on another.After a week or so, there were so many photographers ranged on the opposite bank of the little river, the Oosbach, that bordered the garden and the pool area at the back of the property, that the hotel erected cloth screens to stop them taking pictures of the players’ partners. It was said some of the players’ partners were not happy about that development.I enjoyed the company of the players’ mums and dads, in particular. They were more my age, after all. Neville Neville, father of Gary and Phil, was a good friend of mine and a diamond of a man. Peter Crouch’s parents, Bruce and Jane, were lovely people. The same applied to Joe Cole’s dad, George, and David Beckham’s mum, Sandra, and sister, Joanne.It was an education, too. I hadn’t thought enough about how hard it must be for the parents of players to see their sons lampooned. I talked to the Crouchs about the portrayal of Peter as some sort of freak of nature because of his height. They mentioned the routine references to him as a lamp-post or a beanpole.I travelled with Peter’s parents on the train to England’s match against Sweden in Cologne and played tennis with them at the beautiful clay-court club in Baden-Baden. Phil Carragher was a regular there, too. It was the only tennis club I have ever been to where a pianist performed in the clubhouse.But there were rows, too. They almost always took place in the hotel bar. They happened most nights. There were several players’ families who felt their sons had been badly treated by the media and were eager to air their grievances.There were some heated exchanges. One of my colleagues, a master of bombast and an agent provocateur, was a regular in these rows. One of them centred on the role of the media and how far England would progress in the tournament. ‘Don’t worry,’ my friend told the brother of one of the players, ‘we’ll be here long after you’ve gone home.’ The hotel erected cloth screens to stop the photographers taking pictures of the players’ partners. It was said some of the players’ partners were not happy about that development On the pitch the 'Golden Generation' of players were sluggish, never fully getting going before being knocked out in the quarter-finals on penalties by Portugal It is not something that will be repeated in the USA this summer, with England's squad staying in the Inn at Meadowbrook in Kansas City and their families coming in to visit on occasionThe whole situation was a huge distraction for the players. Some of them were so worried about their partners being accused of partying too much, being irresponsible or being flash that they practically confined them to their rooms. Others were greeted almost daily with photos of their partners walking from the hotel into town in a long line. The brilliant satirist, Marina Hyde, who was in town to witness these parades, nicknamed them the ‘Reservoir WAGs’.Several players have admitted since that the circus around their families damaged their hopes of winning the tournament. ‘It was just wrong,’ the England goalkeeper, Paul Robinson, told me recently.It is not something that will be repeated in the USA this summer. There are no plans, certainly, for there to be any equivalent of the Brenners Park Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, where England will be based for much of the tournament. There will be opportunities for the players to see their partners and their families because, if they do well, they will be away from home for a long time.It is thought that visits are more likely to happen after a particular game, rather than in Kansas City, which is a long way from celebrity hotspots like Miami, Los Angeles and New York City. But whatever the arrangements, it will be nothing like Baden-Baden. The journalists might have enjoyed it there but for some of the players’ families, it was not the kind of company they had been bargaining for.Some of the families did, at least, exact a delicious revenge. The day after England were knocked out of the World Cup in a penalty shootout defeat by Portugal in the quarter-finals, a dozen parents and partners had a farewell lunch on the terrace at Brenners Park. No expense was spared. The drink flowed. A week later, when my colleague who had made the quip about being in Baden-Baden longer than the players’ families, was checking out of the hotel, he noticed an item on his bill he did not remember incurring. It was rather a large charge for lunch for 12.