England star Kyle Walker served with divorce papers by Annie Kilner

Kyle Walker‘s wife Annie Kilner has served the England footballer with divorce papers after the couple began sleeping apart, it was revealed today.

The 31-year-old mother-of-four has instructed lawyers to begin legal proceedings as she prepares to fight for half of the Manchester City defender’s £27million fortune.

The documents were served to Walker ten days ago, and MailOnline understands Walker had moved back into the family home – but not into Kilner’s bed.

The 34-year-old footballer, who earns an estimated £175,000 a week, was said to have been sleeping separately from Kilner in a room on the third floor.

A source told MailOnline: ‘Things are as bad between them as they have ever been. It wasn’t like a normal marriage. They have barely been speaking to each other.

‘She is divorcing Kyle because she just can’t forgive him for what he’s done to her. She can’t get over it. She has tried.

‘Kyle seems to have accepted it’s over. He’s been happier in the last week or so. Like the weight of the world’s been lifted from his shoulders.’

It comes after Walker was praised by a judge in July for being ‘sensible, honest and reliable’ during a family court battle with model Lauryn Goodman over child maintenance payments.

Walker, 34, appeared at the Central Family Court in London in a dispute with Goodman over the amount of money he should pay to support their one-year-old daughter, Kinara.

Goodman, 33, asked the court to order that Walker pay £14,750 a month in ‘global’ child maintenance for the pair’s two children, as well as tens of thousands for cars, furnishing and property maintenance and other costs such as nursery fees.

Walker, who also has four sons with Kilner, opposed some of the demands or argued they should be decreased, telling the court that he was not an ‘open chequebook’ despite earning between £3million and £5million per year.

In his ruling, Judge Edward Hess dismissed many of Ms Goodman’s demands, concluding that she was ‘not reliable’ while claiming Mr Walker ‘acted with dignity and generosity’.

The court heard that Ms Goodman began her legal claim two days after Kinara’s birth.

Her demands included that Mr Walker paid for the upkeep of a hydro-pool, a £28-per-hour gardener, a car worth up to £70,000 every three years and air conditioning costing around £33,000.

In court, Ms Goodman justified the need for a £31,200 artificial turf pitch by stating that Kinara kicked a ball from a crawling position, which could make her a future England footballer, adding: ‘The Lionesses are better than the Lions.’

But the judge dismissed the demand, describing her reasoning as an ‘unjustified evidential leap’.

Ms Goodman further claimed that Mr Walker should pay to fix 59 ‘snagging issues’ at the property bought for her and the children by the footballer under the terms of a previous court order related to their first child, Kairo, claiming they pose a safety risk.

Giving evidence, Ms Goodman said that the money was needed to ‘secure my children’s future’ and that she did not want them to be ‘different’ from Mr Walker’s other children.

The court heard that Mr Walker accepted some of Ms Goodman’s demands, but felt others were disproportionate, with his lawyers claiming that she was making a ‘blatant attempt to leverage’ money for ‘personal benefit’.

The judge said that Walker had already paid more than £430,000, plus thousands more per month, to Ms Goodman for Kinara and changes to her £2.4million Sussex property, which he also purchased.

The footballer also agreed to pay ‘all but a very small portion’ of Ms Goodman’s £259,298 of legal costs related to the dispute, on top of his own fees of £171,440.

In his judgment, Judge Hess encouraged both sides to ‘compromise’ over the ‘snagging’ issues but said he was ‘not persuaded’ by many of Ms Goodman’s demands.

Dismissing Ms Goodman’s claim for air conditioning, the judge said she could mitigate high temperatures in her home by ‘deploying a modestly-priced electric fan’.

Mr Walker was ordered to pay £12,500 per month in child maintenance – a figure he offered before the hearing began – and a sum of £5,000 for furniture compared with Ms Goodman’s initial demand of £20,000.

Mr Walker was also ordered to pay £30,000 for a car to be used by a nanny and other fees.

Ms Goodman has previously publicly confirmed that Mr Walker was the father of her second child, and sent a text to Mrs Walker last December stating: ‘Hey it’s Lauryn I just wanted to quickly tell you that Kyle is the father of our daughter.’

In his ruling, the judge said that Mr Walker had made payments to Ms Goodman to ‘keep the lid’ on the news of her second pregnancy, adding ‘honesty might have been a better policy’.

The judge also added that it was not the court’s role to ‘make moral judgments’ or ‘punish or condemn any perceived human frailties or lack of wisdom’.

But he ruled that the text sent by Ms Goodman to Mrs Walker ‘intended to, and did, cause distress’.

He said: ‘I do not accept the mother’s explanation that this text message was sent in an attempt to create a good working relationship between the two women in the father’s life.

‘In my view, this text was written in the same spirit as the series of text communications with the father’s next-door neighbour in Cheshire in which the mother sought to persuade the neighbour to record conversations over the garden fence with a view to gain material to undermine the father’s marriage.

‘When the mother texted the neighbour to say ‘ready to finish them’, she had in mind causing irreparable damage to the father’s marriage.’