Prince William says his dad, King Charles, hates football and had nothing to do with the Aston Villa obsession

Prince William went on New Heights with Travis and Jason Kelce, the NFL podcast that somehow keeps landing guests no reasonable person would predict, and within the first thirty seconds he threw King Charles directly into traffic. Did his father get him into Aston Villa? ‘Absolutely not,’ William said. ‘My father hates football.’ Just like that. The future king, on a podcast, telling two former Super Bowl champions that the current king cannot stand the sport his son has dedicated decades of his life to supporting.

This is not a small thing. William has been affiliated with the Football Association since around 2010, first as president and now as patron. He talks about Aston Villa the way a middle-aged man from Birmingham talks about Aston Villa, which is to say with the specific, wounded devotion of someone who has suffered. He remembers the relegation. He stayed up for the midweek Championship matches. He was born a month after Villa won the European Cup in 1982 and considers that timing a kind of cosmic injustice. None of this came from his father. It came from school friends dragging him to a match, Villa versus Bolton in 2000, where a young Gareth Southgate happened to be playing defense.

My football love came from friends taking me to my first match. And at school growing up, you can’t avoid the football chat. It’s everywhere.

The Relegation Guy

What makes William an unexpectedly compelling sports guest is that he talks about fandom the way actual fans do, not the way dignitaries pretend to. He did not become more invested in Aston Villa during a title run. He became obsessed during relegation. The drop from the Premier League to the Championship, which means more games, lower stakes, harder travel, and a general atmosphere of institutional shame, is what hooked him for good. That is a psychologically accurate description of how sports addiction works. You do not fall in love during the parade. You fall in love during the rebuild.

I got into football more than ever when we got relegated. I suddenly really enjoyed the battle to get back in the premiership.

He also landed a clean shot on the structural problem with American sports that most American sports media is too polite to say plainly. The tanking conversation in the NFL and NBA has been going on for years, with franchises openly losing games to improve their draft position. William noted, without naming it as tanking, that relegation forces every team to actually compete because the floor drops out if they do not. Jason Kelce agreed immediately, which felt like a small betrayal of the league that made him famous, but an honest one.

Taylor Swift Beats the Touchdown

The Kelces asked William which was the more iconic Wembley moment: Travis scoring a touchdown there in 2015 against the Lions, or Travis serving as a backup dancer at a Taylor Swift concert. William did not hesitate. ‘Travis is a backup dancer,’ he said. Travis called it ‘a very proud moment of my life.’ Neither man seemed bothered by this. William then offered to make sure Taylor Swift brings her tour back to London, which is the kind of sentence that would have sounded insane to describe before you heard it and sounds only slightly less insane after.

If Tay’s gonna sign up for a tour, I’ll happily make sure that we bring her back to life.

The episode is a genuine curiosity, not because a royal appearing on a sports podcast is inherently meaningful, but because William is clearly a real fan talking to real players and no one is performing. Jason had to be corrected three times for calling it soccer. Travis offered William burnt ends. William, to his credit, said burnt ends did not sound great and held his ground. The World Cup episode with an actual head of a football federation, who learned to love the game in spite of his father rather than because of him, turned out to be a better listen than it had any right to be.