Love Island contestants are flirty, but they’re hardly known to be coy. Still, Gemma Owen, daughter of Michael Owen, has yet to announce to the rest of the cast that her father is the famous England footballer.
The ITV2 series returned on Monday (6 June) with a new batch of contestants who entered the Spanish villa in the hopes of finding romance with a side of summer fame.
But one of the contestants is already famous, at least by association. And while Gemma hasn’t publicly declared her sporting parentage, she has dropped a couple of clues.
The first came early as Gemma, a dressage rider, described her life outside the villa to fellow contestant Liam LLewelyn.
“I feel like you have a big house,” Gemma’s audience-assigned love interest responds when he finds out she keeps a dozen horses. Of course, the horses don’t reside in the house, but Liam’s larger point goes unaddressed.
Next, though, the 19-year-old peppers Liam, who is doing his masters in strength and conditioning, about his career as an athlete. By the time she’s through asking him what tier of professional football he reached before tapping out, Liam is suspicious. He guesses that Gemma’s ex-boyfriend might be a footballer. So close!
In a separate conversation, Gemma dropped that her surname is “Owen”. As it’s a common surname in the UK, the cast can’t be faulted for not joining up the dots yet, but the dramatic tension is building.
Speaking directly to the camera, Gemma gave a morsel of insight into life as the former Liverpool great’s daughter. "My dad does have an opinion on who I date,” she said in the season opener.
The audience, too, appears to have an opinion. After the teenager kissed 27-year-old contestant Davide, fans on Twitter started to address the “mad” age gap.
You can read The Independent’s review of the first episode of Love Island here.
