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With a peak of 10m tuning in to watch Spain v Italy, both the BBC and ITV expect bumper audiences for the semis and final games.

The figures for the quarter-final game beat the previous most-watched match of the tournament - Holland v Russia, which attracted 9.2m viewers to ITV1.

The strong ratings follow impressive figures for a wide range of the pool games, with English audiences paying particular attention to tournament favourites, such as Germany, Portugal, France and Holland.

The audiences have buoyed what many observers expected to be a poorly supported tournament for the broadcasters and sparked a surge in the use of the BBC's iPlayer and ITV's web player catch-up services, as many of the matches in the group stages kicked off during office hours.

This month Euro 2008 has knocked Coronation Street off the top of ITV.com's list of most popular shows for video requests, with more than 500,000 views to date. Meanwhile, UEFA this week revealed that fans from the UK generated more traffic to its tournament site than from any other country. Of the 1bn page views since the site's launch in February, 15% of visitors to Euro2008.com were from the UK.

Surprisingly, England's absence appears to have had a positive impact on bookmakers, too. A William Hill spokesman said fans were placing bets to give themselves a reason to watch the matches.

Bookmaker Ladbrokes estimates that by the end of the tournament, gambling spend will be up by £100m on Euro 2004, in which England participated. 'We predict that gambling spend in the UK will be about £350m - up from £250m at Euro 2004,' a spokesman said.