Kyle Walker has become as famous for his off-field exploits as his on-field excellence at Man City.
The right-back is as dependable as they come for Pep Guardiola, and all the while he’s doing the business, he isn’t going to be dropped and his private life will be overlooked.
That’s just as well because Walker clearly doesn’t learn his lesson.
No content with embarrassing himself and his club during lockdown, when he was caught hosting sex parties at his house despite everyone being instructed to stay at home, he then went and got mistress, Lauryn Goodman, pregnant not once, but twice.
The revelation that he’d fathered a second child with his mistress saw his marriage to Annie Kilner collapse, and it prompted a trite and cringeworthy apology from the player via The Sun.
If he thought by doing so that the problem was going to disappear, it looks like he’s completely misread the situation.
According to an interview with Mail+, Goodman admitted that despite their differences, she and Kilner actually got on ok.
“There was a time when I hated her (Kilner)… but surely any mother would question how you could accept a man back but not his child?” she was quoted as saying.
“I won’t get into the private conversations I have had with Annie, but she did tell me Âinitially she felt we were both victims of his manipulative and controlling behaviour, and at times we have got along quite well, apologised to one another and had a mutual understanding.”
All the current news cycle does is keep this tawdry episode front and centre.
Kyle Walker should be writing the headlines for the brilliant work he does on the football pitch, not the childish decisions he makes off it.
What a mess.