England semi-final victory racks up a record 27.6 million viewers

ITV’s exclusive coverage of England’s Euro 2020 semi-final victory over Denmark at Wembley last night peaked with 27.6 million viewers across ITV, ITV Hub and STV, making it the most-watched football match ever shown on one channel.

The one-minute peak figure, calculated across TV and other smart devices including phones and laptops, also gives ITV’s England major tournaments coverage the three biggest ever single channel football match audiences, with 27.5 million tuning in for England’s defeat by Croatia in the 2018 World Cup and 26 million for England v Argentina in 1998.

This makes it bigger than the England World Cup Semi-Final of 2018 and therefore the biggest peak football audience ever, excluding shared broadcasts and the biggest peak for any genre since the 2012 Olympics.

It also means ITV’s combined in-match audiences for the main channel in this tournament are now higher than for the BBC, with 7.237 million viewers compared to 7.160 million.

The match peaked with a staggering 26.3 million viewers on ITV, and an 89.3 percent audience share, with a whistle-to-whistle audience of 23.9m (82.3 percent average share), making it the most watched match of the tournament so far.

Overall, the coverage from 6.30pm to 11.24pm was watched by an average audience of 16.7m viewers (70.6 percent audience share). An additional 0.4m watched on non-TV devices on ITV Hub, bringing the total audience to 17.1m.

The coverage also totalled a record 11 million streams on ITV Hub (10.5 million) and STV Player (0.5 million).

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