Who’s Brighton’s most popular player on Instagram?

Instagram is where all the cool kids hang out these days, or so we’ve been told. So, following hot on the heels of ourBrighton and Hove Albion Twitter League table, we’ve put together a Brighton and Hove Albion Instagram League table which reveals the most popular Seagulls player on the photo sharing platform, how many people they follow and who posts the most.

Most followed Brighton players on Instagram
There’s no prizes for guessing who is the Albion’s most followed player on Instagram with Alireza Jahanbakhsh leading their way with 1,284,458 followers – approximately 1.5% of the population of his home nation of Iran. We were first alerted to the popularity of Jahanbakhsh’s Instagram page during the drawn-out transfer saga that was his £17m move from AZ Alkmaar in the summer.

With nobody sure whether the winger was moving to Brighton, Leicester City, Napoli or another team on the continent, Jahanbakhsh’s Instagram story began to resemble the script of a Taken movie as he posted cryptic clues as to his whereabouts and people kept tabs on his every move trying to work out where he was heading. If Jahanbakhsh was half as good at playing football as he is at producing a suspenseful thriller on Instagram, then he might have actually done something to justify his record-fee in his six months at the Albion so far.

Speaking of players with huge social media followings but who haven’t delivered on the pitch, the second most popular Brighton player on Instagram is Jurgen Locadia with 454,827 followers. Locadia mainly uses his page to post updates on his music career or images from photo shoots in which he looks like a of the cast of wannabe member of the cast of Made in Chelsea. It’s good to see him putting his spare time to such good use – it’s not like he is a £14m striker who has scored a grand total of four goals in a year or anything.

Jose Izquierdo is third on 100,998 while his pet pig, Peter, is something of an Instagram marvel himself and has 33,125 followers on his own page. That’s more than the likes of Glenn Murray, Yves Bissouma, Bruno, Lewis Dunk and Anthony Knockaert have and would be enough to put Peter 13th in the table if he was a human who played for the Albion rather than a micro pig.

Maty Ryan is the fourth most followed player on 92,216 and Leon Balgoun is fifth with 77,439. There’s something of a surprise in sixth where Tomer Hemed sits on 59,230 until you remember that he is married to an absolutely stunning former Miss Israeli. Clearly, nobody is following Hemed for his football career.

Most frequent Brighton Instagramers
Izquierdo is the most frequent poster to the platform, racking up 954 photos. He seems to love having his photo taken in random places around Brighton and Hove, although he will have to go some way to beat the image he shared upon his signing for the Albion of him in the Lanes stood unwittingly next to some “CPFC” graffiti.

Hemed is second with 885 posts with a ratio of about one photo in every 10 featuring his missus and the other member of the Israeli Men (hallelujah!) club Beram Kayal is just behind with 875. Leon Balogun is fourth having shared 777 photos and Ezequiel Schelotto has 675 posts to his name to round off the top five.

Brighton players who follow the most people on Instagram
Davy Propper is the most active Albion player in terms of numbers followed as he keeps tabs on 641 people on Instagram, which is a far cry from the 14 that he follows on Twitter. Balogun clearly spends a lot of time on the platform as he follows 602 users while the popularity of Instagram in Israel is shown by Kayal and Hemed following 600 and 421 people respectively.

Sandwiched between those two in fourth spot is Ezequiel Schelotto who follows 493 accounts – although presumably not Chris Hughton following Schelotto’s criticism of the Albion hierarchy in the aftermath of his loan move to Chievo.

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