Kyle Walker may be worth millions but says he wishes he could “bring his children up on a council estate” to experience the same childhood he did.
The Manchester City star, 34, shares four sons with his estranged wife Annie Kilner - Roman, 11, Riaan, seven, Reign, five, and four-month-old Rezon.
He also has two children with Lauryn Goodman, son Kairo, four, and daughter Kinara, 12 months, but has no contact with them.
Walker - who earns a reported £160,000 a week - opened up about his parenting dilemma on his BBC Sounds podcast You'll Never Beat Kyle Walker.
The defender insisted that despite his vast wealth, his boys are not spoilt and that they “have to entertain themselves”.
He explained: “I say now I have the privileges of having nice things but the kids have to entertain themselves. They play with their brothers and that's it.
“I wish sometimes I could put them on an estate to mingle with different people and have different friends. When I was growing up you'd go and call for your mates.”
His remarks come after he became locked in a bitter legal battle with Lauryn Goodman over child maintenance.
Influencer Goodman, 33, asked the court to order that the Premier League star pay £14,750 a month in “global” child maintenance for the pair’s two children, as well as tens of thousands for cars, furnishing and property maintenance and other costs such as nursery fees.
Ruling in favour of Walker, Judge Edward Hess called Goodman out for “spending money as if it was going out of fashion” and treating the footballer as an “open-ended cheque book”.
While most family court proceedings are confidential, the judge took the unusual step of making the ruling public, concluding that to anonymise or redact the judgment would have opened the court to ridicule.
