New Zealand Defender Tim Payne has just gone viral on social media over the last 24 hours with his Instagram followers growing from 4715 to well over 640,000 (and growing).
How did this happen?
Valentín Scarsini, popularly known as El Scarso on social media made a short video:
Y si hacemos protagonista del mundial al futbolista menos conocido?
What if we make the least known footballer the star of the World Cup?
Scarsini began looking through lower-ranked squads to find the single least-known player in the tournament. He stumbled on Tim Payne, a defender for the New Zealand national team (also known as the All Whites) who at the time only had 4715 followers.
Scarsini chose a football player that everyone could get behind without worrying about nationality. He framed Tim Payne as the ultimate dark horse tasked with winning New Zealand’s first-ever World Cup match. He told his audience to “explode his posts with likes” and “feed the legend of Tim Payne”… and that is what they did … beyond even his expectations.
His idea was to see how many people were talking about Tim Payne before the World Cup starts.
In the first 24 hours, Tim Payne went from 4,715 followers to over 640,000 followers,
His photo as a part of the national team warm up only had 276 likes and 11 comments which has now gone up to 313,000 likes and 14,200 comments (and still growing). His latest post has 366,000 likes and over 51,000 comments, most of them in Spanish.
It will be interesting to see what his social media numbers are once the World Cup begins.
On another note …
Scarsini mentioned that New Zealand has never won a World Cup match … little does he know that NZ was the only UNDEFEATED team to play at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (3 draws).
