Around 2.5 million Iranians followed the Persian-language Instagram account of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in the 48 hours after it was announced that Adel Ferdosipour, a football commentator banned from Iran’s state-run TV, would be commentating on the Champions Asian League final live on AFC’s Instagram page.

Before it was known Ferdosipour would commentate for AFC on the big game between Iran’s Persepolis and Korea’s Ulsan Hyundai, the page had fewer than 250,000 followers. On Friday, a video posted by AFC of Ferdosipour at the Al Janoub Stadium, in Doha, attracted over 2.7 million “likes.”

More than 800,000 Iranians watched the match on AFC’s Instagram page, which Persepolis lost 2-1. Iran’s state-run TV (IRIB) also broadcast it live, with a different commentator. Earlier on Saturday, Iran’s Minister of Communications Mohammad Azari-Jahromi had posted to Instagram an appeal to Iranians to avoid large internet downloads “so everyone can watch the match” online.

Ferdosipour, 46, produced and hosted ‘90’, a popular weekly live football (soccer) show, for Channel 3 of IRIB over nearly two decades. The show’s audience sometimes topped 30 million, and in 2009 Newsweek magazine included him among Iran’s top 20 most powerful people.

But two years ago, IRIB banned Ferdosipour from all sports programs. Mohammad Sarafraz, a former head of the IRIB, later suggested in his book Story of a Resignation that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had demanded the ending of Ferdosipour’s program. At the time, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a member of parliament, said security bodies were sensitive over the broadcaster because of his popularity.

Ferdosipour was known as an opposition Green Movement sympathizer and sometimes cleverly expressed his disapproval of the principlist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during football commentary. In January 2010, a few months after the disputed 2009 presidential election, the program and its producer-host became politically controversial following a stunt by supporters of Green Movement, which had emerged during unrest after the 2019 election.

Over 2 million text messages suddenly came in during one of the program’s frequent polls, sending a green column on a results chart through the roof. The answer represented by the green column was the most unlikely of the three. The program was cut short and in subsequent polls the green bar was replaced with a yellow bar to avoid any repetition.