The Instagram FAQs on their site say that account names are first come, first serve.
They say that if the name you want is on an account that seems inactive you should consider periods, numbers, underscores, or abbreviations to come up with an available name.
They say he violated their terms of service. I took a quick look at the TOS, and don't see anything that having the same name as a celebrity and using your name for your Instagram account would violate. I suppose it is possible that he violated some other term completely unrelated to this whole name thing, and that's why he got kicked off, and then they gave it to the football player even though the football player already had an established, verified, active Instagram account using the same name he uses for his verified Twitter account.
There is one TOS term that his name could be construed as violating, if one were take a ridiculous reading of the term. That's Basic Term 12: "You must not use domain names or web URLs in your username without prior written consent from Instagram". The football player has the andresiniesta.es domain. If we take "domain name" in the rule to include the domain name with the TLD portion removed, then any username with the string "andresiniesta" in it would be covered.
They say that if the name you want is on an account that seems inactive you should consider periods, numbers, underscores, or abbreviations to come up with an available name.
They say he violated their terms of service. I took a quick look at the TOS, and don't see anything that having the same name as a celebrity and using your name for your Instagram account would violate. I suppose it is possible that he violated some other term completely unrelated to this whole name thing, and that's why he got kicked off, and then they gave it to the football player even though the football player already had an established, verified, active Instagram account using the same name he uses for his verified Twitter account.
There is one TOS term that his name could be construed as violating, if one were take a ridiculous reading of the term. That's Basic Term 12: "You must not use domain names or web URLs in your username without prior written consent from Instagram". The football player has the andresiniesta.es domain. If we take "domain name" in the rule to include the domain name with the TLD portion removed, then any username with the string "andresiniesta" in it would be covered.