World Cup: Tim Payne overtakes All Blacks in followers on Instagram after viral World Cup push
All Whites defender Tim Payne has become more popular than the All Blacks on Instagram following a campaign from an Argentine influencer to make him the main character of the Fifa World Cup.
Payne is in Florida with the rest of the All Whites 26-player World Cup squad as they prepare for their warm-up games against Haiti and England.
However, over the past week, a campaign by Argentine football content creator El Scarso, whose real name is Valen Scarsini, to make the Wellington Phoenix defender the main character of this year’s tournament has taken off.
The 32-year-old had about 4000 followers on Instagram before Scarsini uploaded his first video about him on May 27 and now has more than 3.1 million.
This makes him more popular than the All Blacks on the social media platform, who sit at 2.8 million followers.
The All Blacks have jumped on the trend, posting their own video of players dancing to a song made about Payne while at Boca Juniors stadium with the caption “NO PAYNE NO GAAAAIN”
Payne is on a trajectory that could see him become the most popular New Zealand athlete on social media, with just two of the country’s biggest names ahead of him.
The defender is quickly closing in on former Black Caps captain Kane Williamson whose Instagram following is currently at 3.3 million people.
He still has a long way to go to catch former UFC champion Israel Adesanya who has 8.2 million followers.
But according to data from social media analytics website Social Blade, Payne has gained nearly 900,000 followers a day since Scrasini’s video was posted so could become the most popular athlete from the country before the World Cup kicks off.
Speaking after a recent training session, Payne said he was surprised to see all the notifications coming through on his phone.
“One afternoon, [I] just started getting a few random notifications and then looked on my Instagram and noticed that someone had tagged me in a video,” Payne said.
“And it was obviously in Spanish and my Spanish isn’t very great, so I passed it on to my missus, who is fluent in Spanish and she was able to let me know what it was saying.
“And then I think by the time I woke up the next morning there was hundreds of thousands of followers, so yeah, it was pretty crazy.”
Payne and the All Whites will kick off their World Cup campaign against Iran on June 16 at 1pm NZ time.