New Zealand star Tim Payne has taken Instagram by storm of late, but how does he compare to worldwide superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi?
MyBettingSites.co.uk has analysed the Instagram accounts of 1,244 players across all 48 World Cup squads, recording each player’s follower count and calculating their estimated earning potential per sponsored Instagram post.
Top 15 Most Followed World Cup Players on Instagram
The 15 most-followed players at the 2026 World Cup span nine different nations and four continents, but two of them stand in a league entirely of their own.
At the top, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo with 665.6 million followers (est. £5.24 million per post) and Argentina’s Lionel Messi with 506.5 million followers (est. £3.99 million per post) are in a category of their own. Ronaldo alone accounts for 19.6% of all Instagram followers across the entire dataset, a figure that is almost impossible to think about. Third is Brazil’s Neymar with 234.3 million followers (est. £1.85 million per post), followed by France’s Kylian Mbappé with 130.5 million followers (est. £1.03 million per post).
Fifth is Egypt’s Mohamed Salah with 65.4 million followers (est. £514,762 per post), followed by Brazil’s Vinicius Junior in sixth with 59.9 million followers (est. £471,729 per post). Colombia’s James Rodríguez is seventh with 50.1 million followers (est. £394,558 per post).
Eighth is Spain’s Lamine Yamal, who has already amassed 43.3 million followers (est. £340,749 per post), placing him ahead of three players with far longer careers. England’s Jude Bellingham sits ninth with 41.3 million followers (est. £324,905 per post), and Norway’s Erling Haaland rounds out the top ten with 40.6 million followers (est. £320,035 per post).
Croatia’s Luka Modrić is 11th with 38.6 million followers (est. £303,925 per post), which is a remarkable figure for a player who turned 40 in September. Belgium’s Kevin De Bruyne follows in 12th with 26.3 million followers (est. £206,786 per post), with Morocco’s Achraf Hakimi in 13th with 23.5 million followers (est. £184,841 per post). Spain’s Pedri is 14th with 22.5 million followers (est. £177,532 per post), and England’s Marcus Rashford completes the top 15 with 22.3 million followers (est. £175,529 per post).
Tim Payne & The Least Followed Players
New Zealand star Tim Payne became a social media sensation before the World Cup started, thanks to Argentinean influencer Valen Scarsini who urged his followers to pay attention to Payne. The Wellington Phoenix defender originally had a modest follower count of around 5,000 but Scarsini’s “influence” led to a meteoric rise with the New Zealander now boasting approximately 5.5 million followers. That number puts him as the 77th most followed player at the tournament.
To highlight other players with the lowest Instagram following, the top 10 least followed players are: Scotland’s Grant Hanley (1,180 followers), Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Mladen Jurkas (1,341 followers), Curaçao’s Trevor Doornbusch (1,606 followers), Czechia’s Jaroslav Zeleny (1,701 followers), Morocco’s Zakaria El Ouahdi (1,903 followers), Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Ivan Sunjic (2,063 followers), Czechia’s Alexandr Sojka (2,208 followers), Qatar’s Ayoub Al Oui (2,374 followers), Curaçao’s Tyrick Bodak (3,007 followers), and Qatar’s Mohamed Al Mannai (3,188 followers).
But Payne’s story is a reminder that all of that can change in a matter of days. A standout performance on the world stage, a viral moment, or simply catching the attention of the right audience could see any one of these players gain millions of followers before the tournament is over, and with it, an earning potential they could scarcely have imagined when the draw was made.
Most Followed World Cup Nations
On a national level, the story is similarly top-heavy. Portugal and Argentina sit in a tier of their own, not because they have particularly deep squads on social media, but because each contains one of the two most followed human beings on the planet.
Portugal’s total of 743.2 million Instagram followers is so heavily inflated by Ronaldo that removing him from the calculation would drop the squad to roughly 77.6 million, which is still respectable, but closer to seventh than first. The same dynamic applies to Argentina, whose 647.5 million combined followers are built almost entirely on Messi’s 506.5 million followers. Without him, the remaining 24 players hold around 141 million between them.
Brazil stands apart as the only squad in the top five where combined depth, rather than a single player, drives the total of 424 million combined followers. While Neymar leads at 234.3 million followers, his squad-mates include Vinicius Junior (59.9 million followers), Casemiro (22.3 million followers), Raphinha (19.9 million followers) and Endrick (18.3 million followers), giving Brazil the most genuinely distributed social media power of any nation at the tournament.
France is fourth in the country rankings with 229.1 million combined followers. Mbappé accounts for 130.5 million of that figure, but the depth behind him is impressive: Ousmane Dembélé (21.2 million followers), N’Golo Kanté (16.3 million followers), Aurélien Tchouaméni (9.5 million followers) and Jules Koundé (6 million followers) give France one of the strongest supporting set of players at the tournament. Remove Mbappé and the remaining squad still holds around 98.5 million followers, which is more than the full squad totals of every nation outside the top six.
Spain and England sit close to one another in fifth and sixth, each with around 130 million combined followers. Spain benefits from Lamine Yamal’s remarkable rise alongside Pedri (22.5 million followers) and Gavi (19.5 million followers), while England’s total is anchored by Bellingham (41.3 million followers), Rashford (22.3 million followers) and Harry Kane (18.3 million followers).
Germany’s collective reach is also worth noting: their 72.3 million total is not built around a single dominant figure but a generation of high-profile players. Leroy Sané (9 million followers), Manuel Neuer (14.6 million followers), Jamal Musiala (7.3 million followers) and Florian Wirtz (5 million followers).
The Big Four: A League of Their Own
Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar and Mbappé do not simply lead the Instagram rankings at the 2026 World Cup; they occupy a statistical dimension that makes meaningful comparison to any other player almost impossible.
Together, the four players hold 1.54 billion combined followers, which represents 45.4% of all followers across the entire player dataset. The remaining 1,240 players share the other 54.6%. Four individuals account for almost as many Instagram followers as the other 1,240 players combined.
To put Ronaldo’s 665.6 million followers in context: he has more than five times the followers of the entire England squad (129 million) with estimated per-post earnings of £5.24 million.
Messi’s 506.5 million followers are equivalent to nearly four times England’s entire squad total.
Neymar’s 234.3 million followers, which is the third globally among all World Cup players, translate to an estimated £1.85 million per post. That is more than the combined estimated per-post earnings of any national squad outside the top four nations in the country rankings.
Mbappé sits fourth with 130.5 million followers and an estimated £1.03 million per post. At 27, he is the youngest of the quartet and the only one whose social media presence is still actively growing at scale. Already among the most followed people on Instagram globally, his commercial trajectory shows no sign of slowing.
You can also have a look at the Latest Sports & Betting News.
Methodology
- Instagram follower counts were recorded for all players named in the 48 World Cup squads, with the latest data collected on 8 June 2026.
- Estimated earnings per sponsored post are calculated using an industry benchmark of potentially earning $10 per 1,000 followers, converted to GBP at the prevailing rate.
- Figures are estimates only and do not account for engagement rates or exclusivity agreements.
- In total, 1244 players were analysed. 32 players either have no Instagram account or have an account that is not publicly accessible; these players are excluded from all follower and earnings totals.
