Jamie Vardy’s route from non-league obscurity to Premier League title winner is well documented. Less understood — and more heavily distorted by recycled tabloid content — is the shape of the family he built along the way. Between Vardy and his wife, Rebekah, there are six children spanning two decades and three separate relationships, only three of whom share both parents. Some of that story is on the record, confirmed by the couple themselves in interviews and, more recently, on camera in the ITV series The Vardys. Other parts remain deliberately private, and a significant amount of what circulates online about the family — birth years in particular — does not agree from one source to the next. This piece separates what has actually been confirmed from what has simply been repeated.
The Family at a Glance
- Ella — Jamie Vardy’s eldest child, born in 2010, from his relationship with Emma Daggett. Raised entirely outside the Vardy household.
- Megan — Rebekah‘s eldest child, born in the mid-2000s (reports vary between 2003 and 2005), legally adopted by Jamie in 2016.
- Taylor — Rebekah’s son with former footballer Luke Foster, born around 2010, also legally adopted by Jamie.
- Sofia — Jamie and Rebekah’s first child together, born in 2014, months into their relationship.
- Finley Jaiden — Jamie and Rebekah’s second child together, born January 2017.
- Olivia Grace — Jamie and Rebekah’s third child together, born 28 December 2019, name confirmed publicly on 13 January 2020.
A Household Built Before the Marriage
Jamie Vardy’s first child predates his fame by several years. Ella was born in 2010 to Emma Daggett, whom Vardy was seeing while still playing non-league football, prior to his move to Halifax Town and long before Leicester City came calling. That timing matters to the story: Ella was already a toddler by the time Vardy’s career accelerated, and she has never been part of the household that formed once he met Rebekah in 2014.
The relationship between Vardy and Ella has been the subject of tabloid reporting for over a decade, most of it sourced to Daggett rather than to Vardy himself. Daggett has told newspapers, including The Sun, that contact between father and daughter has been limited — in one widely cited account, “once a month.” A 2016 detail that circulated at the time — that a pair of Vardy’s boots bore his other daughters’ names but not Ella’s — was seized on by outlets as evidence of the rift, though Vardy has not addressed it publicly in any verified statement. Ella did not attend her father’s 2016 wedding to Rebekah at Peckforton Castle, and she has appeared in neither the Netflix documentary Untold: Jamie Vardy nor The Vardys. Because Ella is a minor who has been deliberately kept out of public life by her mother, the specifics of her home life and her exact birth date are not independently verifiable, and this piece treats them accordingly — as reported claims, not settled fact.
Rebekah Vardy, for her part, brought two children into the relationship from a previous relationship of her own. Her daughter Megan was born in the mid-2000s; sourcing on the exact year is inconsistent, with some reports citing 2003 and others 2005, and Rebekah has not publicly clarified the discrepancy. Rebekah has also consistently declined to name Megan’s biological father in any interview. Her son Taylor, born around 2010, is the child of former semi-professional footballer Luke Foster, with whom Rebekah was in a relationship for roughly six years before they separated.
Legal Adoption: The Detail Most Coverage Gets Wrong
A recurring point of confusion in online content about the Vardy family is whether Jamie is Megan and Taylor’s stepfather or their legal father. The answer, confirmed by multiple UK outlets at the time, is the latter: when Jamie and Rebekah married in May 2016, he formally adopted both children. Megan’s surname was legally changed from Nicholson — Rebekah’s maiden name — to Vardy that same year. This is not a symbolic detail. It means Megan and Taylor carry the Vardy name with full legal standing, not as an honorary or stepfamily arrangement, and it is one of the more concrete, well-sourced facts in a family narrative otherwise thick with speculation.
“He already plays the role of Megan’s dad and she refers to him as Daddy — but making it legally binding will make it extra special.” — a source close to the family, quoted by The Sun ahead of the 2016 adoption
The Three Children Born to Jamie and Rebekah
Sofia, born in 2014, arrived within months of her parents meeting — Rebekah has said she was already pregnant a few months into the relationship. Sofia was present, as a toddler, at her parents’ 2016 wedding, and her earliest years coincided with Leicester City’s improbable 2015–16 Premier League title win.
Finley Jaiden followed in January 2017, the couple’s only son together. His birth came with an unpleasant footnote: Rebekah has spoken candidly in interviews about the online abuse she received over her post-pregnancy body in the weeks afterward, and later disclosed that she experienced postnatal depression following an earlier birth, for which she sought cognitive behavioural therapy.
Olivia Grace was born on 28 December 2019, with her name withheld from the public for roughly two weeks before Jamie and Rebekah confirmed it via a Hello! magazine feature on 13 January 2020. Her birth landed at an unusually difficult moment: Coleen Rooney’s “Wagatha Christie” Instagram post, accusing Rebekah’s account of leaking stories to the press, had gone out less than three months earlier, while Rebekah was heavily pregnant. The libel case that followed — Rebekah sued Rooney for defamation and lost, with the High Court ordering her to pay a substantial sum toward Rooney’s legal costs — unfolded in the background of Olivia’s earliest infancy, though it centred on the mothers, not the children, and there is no verified reporting suggesting the children were drawn into the litigation itself.
Timeline
- 2010 — Ella born to Jamie Vardy and Emma Daggett.
- ~2010 — Taylor born to Rebekah and Luke Foster (exact year disputed across sources).
- 2014 — Rebekah and Jamie meet; Sofia born later that year.
- 26 May 2016 — Jamie and Rebekah marry at Peckforton Castle, Cheshire; Jamie’s adoption of Megan and Taylor is finalised around this period.
- January 2017 — Finley Jaiden born.
- 28 December 2019 — Olivia Grace born; name confirmed publicly in January 2020.
- 2025–2026 — Jamie signs for Serie A club Cremonese; the family relocates to Italy, documented in the ITV series The Vardys.
The 2026 Move to Italy — Who Actually Went
Vardy’s move to Cremonese and the family’s relocation to a rented property near Lake Garda has been filmed for The Vardys, giving the public an unusually direct (if produced) look at how the six children have adjusted. Sofia, Finley and Olivia — the youngest three — are shown adapting to a new school and a new language. Taylor, now in his mid-teens, faces the more disruptive challenge of an international move during secondary school years. Megan, now an adult in her early twenties, is described in coverage as part of the broader family unit, though whether she has relocated with the family or remained in England has not been confirmed in any interview or on the programme itself.
Ella is not part of this chapter. She remains in England with her mother, and nothing in the credible reporting around the family’s move to Italy suggests that has changed.
What Isn’t Known — and Why That’s Worth Saying
A large volume of content about “Jamie Vardy’s children” online repeats the same handful of details with cosmetically altered wording, and in doing so introduces errors that then get copied further: Megan’s birth year shifts between 2003 and 2005 depending on the source; Ella’s is sometimes given as 2010, sometimes as 2011, based on an age cited in a single year’s report rather than a confirmed birth record. Neither Jamie nor Rebekah has published exact birth dates for Megan, Taylor or Ella, and no verified interview addresses the gap between how closely the family’s biological children are documented on social media compared with how little is shown of Ella. Where this piece cannot resolve a contradiction with a primary source — an interview, an official announcement, a court record — it has said so rather than picking the more commonly repeated version and presenting it as settled.
The Wider Picture
What the verifiable record shows is a family assembled in stages, under increasing public visibility, with the adoption of Megan and Taylor standing out as a rare instance of Jamie actively formalising a relationship the tabloids had already assumed. Ella’s story sits at the other end of that spectrum — a child whose mother has actively kept her out of the media that covers her father’s other five children, and whose limited contact with Vardy has been reported almost exclusively from her mother’s side, without a matching account from Vardy. Between those two poles sit Sofia, Finley and Olivia, whose childhoods have played out largely inside the media apparatus their parents have built — Rebekah’s Instagram, magazine deals, and now a reality series — in a way neither of their older half-siblings’ childhoods did.