The World Cup may be well and truly over – and best forgotten – but the media’s favourite sport, that of WAG-bashing, is still going strong.

Today the ladies the press love to hate are charged with ‘destroying the village of Prestbury’ in Cheshire.

The once-flourishing High Street of this pretty, quintessential English village is now facing its demise, as the closure of the Post Office and local family butcher put yet another nail, disguised as a ‘to let’ sign, in the coffin.

It seems that the arrival of Rooney and Hargreaves, along with a clutch of other football stars (and their wags), is responsible. Attracted by the village’s rural charm and its proximity to Manchester United’s training ground, they are throwing up multi-million pound mansions, pricing out locals in the process, and then refusing to shop in the village, preferring New York, Manchester and Ocado deliveries instead.

Local councillor Bill Livesley says: “It’s very nice that they live in our area but we wish they would invest their good capital in the community… Young local people have been priced out of the area – children who’ve grown up here have to move out of Prestbury to be able to afford to buy a property.”

It’s true. The figures on our sister site, Findaproperty.com, show that the national average price for first-time buyer properties in July was £155,994, whereas in Prestbury you could expect to pay almost double, at £294,116.

And thanks to the my-mansion-is-bigger-than-your-mansion world of Premiership footballers, Prestbury now boasts the most expensive road in the north of England, where the average house price is £1.2 million.

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