Coleen Rooney has opened up about her 24-year relationship with former footballer Wayne Rooney – saying that people are “too quick to give up” on their marriages.
The I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! star married ex-England international Wayne in 2008, having started dating when they were 16 years old. During the early years of their marriage, Wayne’s various alleged infidelities were splashed across the tabloids – with The Sunday Mirror reporting in 2010 that he had slept with a sex worker while Coleen was pregnant with their first son, Kai.
Ahead of the couple’s new Disney+ reality show The Real Rooneys, Coleen spoke about sticking with Wayne during periods of intense media scrutiny.
“The main thing is love has always been there,” she told OK! magazine. “People are too quick to give up on working at things, too vocal in the moment and saying ‘right that’s enough’. What we’ve done is actually talked and tried to work things out.”
She added that the couple “still love each other” and have a connection after all these years. “We’ve still got feelings. We’ve done well, I think,” she continued. “And the biggest thing we’ve done well is actually dealing with our relationship with the world looking in on us. People have been so vocal about our marriage and we’ve dealt with it behind closed doors.”
Wayne also told the publication that he still expects them to face “tough moments” in the future. “Every married couple has that,” he said. “But I think most importantly when you sit down and look back, we’ve had great moments and we’ve still got so much of our life to live together with our children, hopefully with their children, and us as grandparents as well.”
The celebrity couple are parents to four sons: Kai, 16, Klay, 13, Kit, 10, and eight-year-old Cass. They have weathered multiple storms over the years, with Coleen moving out of the family home with son Kai after the claims that Wayne slept with sex worker Jennifer Thompson.
They later reconciled, but soon afterwards, it was reported that Wayne paid £1,000 for a threesome with Thompson and another sex worker called Helen Wood.
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In 2019, Wayne was pictured in a Vancouver hotel lobby following an unknown woman into a lift in the early hours of the morning.
At the time, he put out a statement asserting that “nothing happened between me and any girl on that night in Vancouver, and that he “did not enter the lift alone with the girl pictured in the hotel foyer”. He described the story as a “smear” that was “damaging to my family”.
Coleen spoke about her husband’s difficult past while appearing on I’m a Celebrity in 2024, ultimately finishing in second place on the ITV reality show that year. Speaking to fellow campmate Oti Mabuse, she said: “Since the first mistake he’s made, that’s been in the public, people have not forgiven.
“When things have happened the public have wanted it to just go oh, split, you know, that’s it, split them up. But the fact is, there’s always been love still there. It has been difficult, but we’re happy now, after all those years… we’re a team.”