Prince William says England can win World Cup, jokes his father hates football

Prince William backed England’s World Cup chances and teased that King Charles III “hates football” during a surprise appearance on Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast, a crossover moment that put a future king inside one of the biggest informal sports-entertainment platforms in the United States.

The episode, released Friday, July 3, 2026, ran about 28 to 29 minutes and centered on the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which the United States, Canada and Mexico are co-hosting. Jason Kelce introduced William as “the 6-foot-3 prince from London, England,” underscoring the light, comic tone of a conversation that still carried real symbolic weight for English football supporters. William is not only a familiar royal face at sporting events but also president of the Football Association.

William said his own loyalty to football did not come from Charles, but from friends taking him to his first match. He said his family did not have a long football tradition and named Aston Villa as his childhood club. Recalling the game that first hooked him, he pointed to an Aston Villa v Bolton match in the early 2000s and said he remembered seeing Gareth Southgate play there.

The exchange also leaned into the transatlantic divide that has long shaped how the sport is discussed on both sides of the Atlantic. William joked with Travis Kelce about Americans calling football “soccer,” and said one of the biggest culture shocks for British fans traveling to the United States would be the scale of the stadiums. He also suggested U.S. beer would be part of the conversation for visiting supporters, along with the atmosphere inside American venues.

The appearance followed weeks of speculation about whether William would show up on the Kelce podcast and came after a much more public royal crossover last year, when William and his two eldest children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, met Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift backstage at Swift’s Eras Tour concert in London in June 2024. For the Kelce brothers, the interview played as a novelty; for England, it put its most visible football royal in the middle of a World Cup moment built for global reach.