Battle of football influencers delivers Australia’s Kai Trewin 100k Instagram followers

Forget the football pitch, Instagram is the pre-World Cup battleground for Australia, New Zealand and … social media influencers. Socceroos defender Kai Trewin has become the latest player to be caught up in an Instagram trend that aims to make relatively low-profile World Cup squad members famous before the tournament begins. As a result of an internet campaign that hopes to make the 25-year-old “the Cristiano Ronaldo of the World Cup” Trewin has amassed 100,000 new followers overnight. Last week South American influencer Valen Scarsini – known as “El Scarso” – created a challenge to make the least-followed player heading to the World Cup famous , and encouraged his community to follow New Zealand defender Tim Payne. Since being called out, Payne has gone from a meagre 5,000 followers to more than 4.6 million at the time of writing. Trewin, who boasted just 3,000 followers on his Instagram account, was discovered by another football content creator, RubikayTV, who disputed Payne’s status as the least followed player. RubikayTV set a challenge to his own followers to get behind the Australian player. “Tim Payne is not the least-known player at the World Cup; that honour belongs to Kai Trewin, Australia’s wingback,” RubikayTV said. “If Tim Payne is Messi, why not make Trewin the Cristiano Ronaldo of the World Cup ?” Allow Instagram content? This article includes content provided by Instagram. …