A little-known New Zealand footballer gained more followers than his country has people in just a few days. For Mark Ritson, Tim Payne’s sudden fame, just before the World Cup, lays bare something no brand can ever replicate. Humanity.
Tim Payne preparing for the World Cup after viral sensation (Instagram/Tim Payne)
Chances are, you started the week not knowing the name. And ended it, unable to avoid him. The 32-year-old defender plays for Wellington Phoenix, a team you don’t know, in a league you have never heard of, in a country that has never won a match at a World Cup.
He has earned 50-odd caps for New Zealand in an unremarkable, dependable way, the kind you retire on and occasionally surprise people with at the pub.
Two weeks ago, he had 4,700 followers on Instagram. He had posted twice all year.
Then an Argentine content creator called Valen Scarsini, who trades online as El Scarso, went looking for the least famous footballer at the 2026 World Cup. He ranked all 1,248 registered players and landed on Payne. He told his audience that here was a man who united us all, a footballer we could support regardless of nationality, and that the mission was simply to make him famous. Flood his posts. Mention him everywhere. Build a social media legend from scratch. A tiny Kiwi scratch.
I saw a young Steven Bartlett do this a decade ago at a conference. He invented a 16-year-old phenom called Rex Secco and then used the digital skills of his Social Chain agency to have the fictional football star trend across social media. The results were impressive but left a queasy aftertaste. The stunt confirmed Social Chain’s capabilities, along with the manipulative possibilities at the heart of digital life. A Russia-sized hole in the authenticity of culture.
At least Tim Payne is real.
Even if his newfound fame isn’t, El Scarso worked at a speed that should frighten anybody who sells marketing for a living. Payne crossed 1m followers inside 24 hours. By the time he met Scarsini at New Zealand’s training camp in Florida last week, the number had passed 5m on Instagram. [It’s up another 400k since Mark wrote this.]
There is a song. There are stickers. The man who could not get a parking ticket in March now gets 50,000 comments on a single post marking his 50th cap.
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He has more followers than the All Whites, the national team he actually plays for. Twice the followers of the All Blacks, the most successful sporting institution New Zealand has ever produced, a brand with a 130-year history and a full-time digital marketing team. A reserve full-back overtook them in four days. Payne has nine times the follower count of Air New Zealand, the beloved national carrier. Heinz, a brand whose ketchup sits in a fridge on every inhabited continent, a name older than the motor car, manages about 256,000 followers on its global account. The bloke from the Phoenix is 20 times bigger.
And we should not be surprised.
Social media has always been social media. The clue is in the name. These platforms were built for people to follow people, and the entire architecture rewards exactly that. We follow Payne because there is a face, a story, an underdog, a man visibly bewildered by his own fame, saying gracias and meaning it. There is something there to attach to.
In contrast, people don’t want to follow a yogurt or get messages from a brand of cat food. A person is a natural object of affection, and Scarsini understood that he was not manufacturing interest in a footballer so much as manufacturing a character we could all decide to love at once.
Brands cannot do this, and the failure is inherent rather than a matter of effort or budget. Air New Zealand has tried. Heinz has tried. But a corporate account on a social platform is a thing pretending to be a person, and everyone can feel the pretense even when they can’t name it.
The platform is for people, and the brand is not one. So it posts, and it boosts, and it begs for engagement, and it accumulates a following measured in the low hundreds of thousands while a man who plays in front of half-empty stadiums in Wellington romps past it in an afternoon. Social media is for the social. Brands are the gatecrashers, and the room knows.
Which is precisely why the brands did what they did next. The moment Payne went vertical, they swarmed.
McDonald’s commented.
KFC commented.
Duolingo, the reigning champion of online brand desperation, was in there.
Inter Miami, whose training facility happened to be where New Zealand were preparing, hustled Payne into promoting their sessions.
This was brands doing the only thing brands can do on a platform built for people: find a person and stand as close to them as possible, hoping a little of the organic body heat rubs off.
Marketers have a $200 word for this.
Borrowed interest.
You cannot generate affection from a logo, so you borrow it from someone with it to spare. Influencer marketing, in its entirety, is the industrialization of this two-step dance: a person is loved online in a way a brand never will, but that love is then rentable by the post.
So here is the thing to take away. Tim Payne will go back to being a dependable defender the moment the tournament ends and the followers drift off to the next manufactured darling.
Scarsini proved he could conjure 5m followers from nothing in a week, attached to a man with no engagement history and no marketing budget, simply because he was a person, and the platform is built for people. No brand on earth can replicate that, no matter how much it spends. Which is why brands will keep doing the next best thing: finding the people the internet has chosen to love, and renting them out.
Tim Payne, the former least famous footballer at the World Cup, just reminded the entire industry of the oldest digital lesson of them all: social media is social media.
Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and seven-time winner of the PPA’s Columnist of the Year. 300,000 followers, too. But MiniMBA is bigger.
Read more opinion from Mark.
