The Tim Payne Phenomenon 🤯 And why Callan Elliot might start in his place at the FIFA World Cup

Tim Payne has become a household name.

He was once the least known player at the FIFA World Cup, and now pretty much everybody has Tim Payne's name on their lips.

Jacob, what has the last few days been like for Tim Payne? Put yourself in his shoes, mate.

I want to know if his Instagram app is working at all, mate.

Can you imagine going on there and just being like, bang, bang, bang, bang, more notifications, more tags.

Stuff like this doesn't come with a warning.

And I would just love to have known how Paini and the boys, you know, how they would have reacted because you're in different hotel rooms and then the boys are just meeting the hall and they were like, have you seen this? What is

happening? I'll be at the dinners, it'll be at the dinners, they'll be like, because normally you're not really allowed your phones at the table, but I'm sure all of them, even Bae's be going, what's, what's, what's Payne Watch at? Every morning, every morning I get up, I just shout to my daughter Bethany, I'm like, Bae, what's Payne Watch? And she'll just shout out a figure.

And I'll be like, Jesus.

And my wife is in PR and marketing, so she kind of understands this business way better than me.

And I'm like, what's going on at this stage? You know, it gets to a million.

What's going on at this stage? And then I'm like, what now? And she's like,

yeah,

now he's at the stage where he probably wishes none of this had ever started.

I'm like, oh, my God, poor fella.

So, yeah, pretty crazy, pretty surreal for him.

Probably won't really sink in for... for a little while and he's probably watching it as well and you can't help but check what you're at.

It's a really strange situation.

Have you guys got to the point where you're like, oh, it hasn't moved off 3 million? Yeah, what's going on? Where's 3.1 coming? What's going on? Why is it slowing down? Come on.

I want 5 mil.

Well, mate, by the end of the week, he probably has five mil and more.

Let's talk a few statistics because the line graph charting his success, if you like, on Instagram is just, it's going crazy, right? So in the last little while, he surged past the Black Caps Instagram account.

They have two million followers.

He went past the All Blacks official account.

They've got just shy of three million.