As soccer’s 2024 UEFA European Championship has progressed into its knockout stages, viewership across Europe has continued to maintain its strong levels, with audiences in the UK surging to a new 2024 high for England’s round-of-16 clash against Slovakia.
The game, which took place in Gelsenkirchen, Germany on June 30, was broadcast on commercial free-to-air broadcaster ITV and drew an average audience of 15.6 million across its primary ITV1 channel and ITVX OTT service.
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Peaking at 18.4 million viewers, England's dramatic 2-1 extra-time win held a 66% national audience share and was the most-watched TV event on ITV since its coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, soccer’s biggest quadrennial event.
England’s previous fixture, the group stage game against Slovenia, drew 15.4 million which to that point had also been the highest event on ITV in 2024.
Meanwhile, in Spain, Euro 2024’s late fixture on Sunday between the national team and Georgia drew the highest audience of the tournament yet in the country.
An average of 9.06 million viewers watched Spain’s 4-1 win, improving on the 8.5 million average tally that watched Spain’s victory over Italy in the group stage and making it the largest TV audience in Spain in 2024.
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By GlobalDataThe match achieved a 60.3% audience share in the country on the free-to-air commercial broadcaster La 1 (owned by state-owned media group Television Europa) and notched around 14 million individual unique users across its broadcast.
Spain’s strong performances at the competition have brought in high domestic viewership for all of its games. Beyond the aforementioned Italy fixture, Spain’s wins over Albania and Croatia also performed well with La 1 viewers.
Spain's opening 3-0 victory over Croatia drew an average of 5.07 million viewers and a 49.9% audience share, while the 1-0 win over Albania to round off the group stage achieved an average of 6.7 million viewers, a national viewership share of 48.1%, and a peak viewership of 7.7 million.
The previous day’s games (June 29) also performed well in their domestic markets. In Germany, national broadcaster ZDF drew a 23.6 million viewership average (76.8% market share).
In Italy, meanwhile, the national team’s poor round-of-16 loss to Switzerland that saw them knocked out of the competition was watched by 10.7 million viewers on free-to-air (Rai) and 1.65 million on pay-TV (Sky Italia), the team’s second-worst TV viewership performance of the competition.
