England game proves ratings victory for ITV

ITV’s exclusive coverage of England’s Euro 2020 semi-final victory over Denmark at Wembley last night was a huge ratings success for the network.

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

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.

Overall, the coverage from 6.30pm to 11.24pm was watched by an average audience of 16.7m viewers (70.6%). 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).

EastEnders’ ratings are on the floor more often than Kat Moon’s knickers currently.

The ratings were obviously affected elsewhere with already struggling EastEnders struggling some more pulling in just 1.82 million (9.3%) of viewers, it was equally as bad for one-time ratings hit Holby City that managed 1.03 million (3.9%) and The Bidding Room managing 543k (1.9%).

There was also an unusual win for ITV’s late news offering with 3.81 million turning on at 11.15pm, while the BBC News at Ten fell below a million to 892k.

The final, England v Italy, will be screened on both BBC One and ITV. Traditionally, the ‘one button’ wins out of ease in such situations and the Beeb draw the better ratings when finals are aired on both main PSBs.