Prince William explains why he keeps refusing his three kids’ adorable request to follow in his footsteps

Even princes have hobbies, and one of Prince William‘s is following the soccer team Aston Villa. The prince is reportedly quite the fan, going so far as to post anonymously on fan forums when he isn’t attending games or watching them at home with his kids. Unfortunately for his kids, this is one interest William isn’t keen for them to share — for a very cute reason.

The Sun recently put out an exclusive covering William’s journey towards becoming a massive soccer fan. In the interview, William talks about his first introductions to soccer and to the team being from “family friends” taking him to see a match. He was hooked, but when William was growing up, following the game was a little more difficult than it was today — with no Internet, no 24-hour sports news channels, and a royal lifestyle, William had to resort to looking at “the back pages of newspapers” to get his fix.

The prince credits the smartphone for his growing interest in the game thanks to the ready availability of data — as well as opportunities for discussion.

I’m not certain why I became much more interested then but it might have been due to the rise of the smartphone. I’d grown up looking at Ceefax on the television or the back pages of newspapers and if you didn’t have those to hand you were a bit out of the loop. But now you can get so much data and follow how your team is doing all the time and there’s so much more discussion and debate. That’s how my passion really increased.

So why doesn’t William want his kids to follow in his footsteps? Well, it’s not because he doesn’t want them to like soccer! It’s because he wants them to find their own treasured teams with memories of their own — he doesn’t want them to feel forced into supporting Aston Villa.

I’m kind of hoping they’ll all find their own teams in time. They don’t all have to be Villa fans. I’m trying not to be biased but obviously they see how passionate I am about it and they watch the matches with me. I’m trying to spread the love a little bit.

If, in the fullness of time, his kids do come to like Aston Villa FC, William is unlikely to complain. But until then he’s letting them make their own choices when it comes to which team — if any — they want to support. This is a very normal part of childhood and parenting, as many parents want to share a passion with their kids but don’t want to force it on them. It feeds into a narrative, too, that William and Kate are trying to get away from strict protocol with their kids in the hopes that they’ll have a much more ordinary childhood experience.

For many kids, shared sporting experiences and memories with their dad are core memories. For a family as unique as the Royal Family, where the children can’t travel together in the same vehicles due to concerns about the succession, ordinary days out or afternoons spent watching soccer with their dad could very well be the difference between yet another weird royal upbringing and something approaching normal.