There are no winners on either side in theBeckham family saga. Brooklyn has taken heavy, dismissive fire for sharing his so-called first-world, nepo baby problems with the entire planet. But as a father, I’d be devastated at the idea of any of my kids shutting my wife and I out of their lives.

If you still don’t have any sympathy for Brooklyn Beckham, consider this: His mum Victoria allegedly, bizarrely, owns her son’s name as a trademark. It means he - a 26-year-old grown man - isn’t able to use his own identity for trading without his parents’ consent.

Welcome to the wonderfully insane world of a Beckham meltdown as explosive as any Netflix drama. That explosive social media post from Brooklyn, tearing into his parents David and Victoria, screamed ‘prisoner in plain sight’ on a scale of Prince Harry on the Buckingham Palace balcony.

• DARREN LEWIS: 'Joke is on us if Reform's clowns are ever trusted'

• David and Victoria Beckham look sombre in first joint appearance since Brooklyn statement

Truth be told, the entire thing is mind-blowingly sad. You’ll know by now that UK records from the Intellectual Property Office show that 51-year-old Victoria owns the trademarks to Brooklyn and her other three children. Instinctively, most of us are cynically dismissive of a family with more money and fewer surface problems than the rest of us will ever have

But it isn’t David’s fault that he has made the most of his generational footballing talent. Nor is it Victoria’s fault - with a family estimated at more than half a billion pounds - that she has been blessed with a ruthless business acumen. In the same vein, Brooklyn has taken heavy, dismissive fire for sharing his so-called first-world, nepo baby problems with the entire planet.

But as a father, I’d be devastated at the idea of any of my kids shutting my wife and I out of their lives. The pain would be visceral in private. Publicly it would tear my world apart. There are no winners on either side in the Beckham family saga. That all said, I still feel a wave of sympathy for Brooklyn. None of us know anything about the bits behind closed doors.

It might just be his wife, 31-year-old Nicola Peltz, is indeed as headstrong as his mother. As parents we take command of many things but none of us have any control over who our children fall in love with. But, like Harry, Brooklyn has never had a chance. As has been pointed out since he detonated the whole thing on social media last week, he has been commodified and commercialised by his parents since his time in his mother’s womb.

He has had zero control over the many stories, pictures and magazine features negotiated for and about him since he was born. And, let’s not kid ourselves: Most of us would lap up the trade off of a lavish lifestyle in exchange for a camera in our faces for most of our lives, shredding our privacy and showcasing our lives.

But Brooklyn’s blast on instagram and X, sent viral around the world within minutes, are proof that the fantasy doesn’t translate to reality that simplistically. The idea that a guy born into wealth can’t be unhappy, suffocated or determined to step out of his parent’s shadow is insane.

Next, we’ll be claiming footballers can’t struggle with mental health issues because they earn £50,000-a-week. Its as misguided as believing a 12 year old Harry wouldn’t be scarred by walking behind his mother Princess Diana’s coffin, in the name of duty, in 1997. Harry has since spoken candidly about the “traumatic”, “surreal” experience, recalling the residual psychological effect it has had on him.

But while our society likes to say all the right, positive things about mental health, Harry was also widely vilified for daring to speak out of turn. The parallels with Brooklyn are striking. Yes, like Harry’s wife Meghan Markle, Nicola has her own family fortune - estimated at three times that of the Beckhams - and zero need for their validation.

But reading between the lines of Brooklyn’s confessional, the money on both sides comes a distant second. Brooklyn is a young man in pain. We’d dok well to listen