England’s elimination from the World Cup was watched by a peak audience of 23 million viewers, giving ITV its best Saturday night in 20 years and making it the most watched TV moment of 2022.
The quarter-finals attracted the largest audience of the tournament that year and the highest peak across all channels.
The clash attracted 31 million viewers, the highest number since last year’s EURO final between England and Italy.
The 23 million viewers on ITV and ITVX do not include the millions of others who watched together in pubs, bars and restaurants.
It showed the power of live football for a commercial broadcaster and gave ITV the best Saturday night since a new rating method was introduced in 2002.
The event was a major test for ITVX, the new streaming replacement for ITV Hub, which has been infuriating fans with technical glitches during live matches in England.
There have been complaints on social media that fans are unable to access the game through ITVX because the new app is not installed on their TVs.
But overall ITVX had a successful day with 15.3 million recorded streams of England vs. France. Shown live on ITV on Saturday, Morocco’s victory over Portugal was broadcast 8.2 million times.
There were a total of 30 million streams on ITVX yesterday, which is the best for an ITVX hub.
The game in France averaged 20.4 million viewers across all devices, rising to 23 million in a heartbreaking climax when Harry Kane missed a penalty.
That year, it was the most watched single-channel television program among all viewers (15.1 million) and 16-34 year olds (2.5 million).
The Queen’s State Funeral was watched by 26.2 million viewers on the BBC, ITV and other channels covering the event.
England, with a peak audience of 26.5 million, exited the 2018 ITV World Cup in the semi-finals.
England’s last World Cup match, a play-off against Senegal last Sunday night, was watched live by 20 million viewers.
England’s departure means Italy’s €31m total is now unlikely to match the midweek semi-finals or the World Cup final starting at 3pm next Sunday.
In that game, England fell behind Qatar for the first time after an early blitz from Aurélien Chouameny, only Kane equalized from a penalty to match Wayne Rooney’s record 53 caps.
France’s top scorer Olivier Giroud regained the World Cup lead after Harry Kane missed a late penalty to end 2-1 in the quarter-finals.
England have a long history of missing penalties, which is commonly seen in penalty shootouts such as Italy’s final defeat at Euro 2020 last summer.
Source: I News

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