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Today Mark Harris, managing director of Sunday Sport 2011, said he was "bloody delirious" as sales of the Midweek Sport exceeded expectations.

Sales of around 80,000 put the midweek title on a par with the Sunday Sport, Harris said.

The title, like its sister Sunday Sport tabloid, is not ABCs audited, so there is no way of independently authorising the figure.

Copy sales of the Sunday Sport have been around 78,000 to 80,000 copies in recent weeks, claims the publisher.

The first issue of the 64-page Midweek Sport went on sale last Wednesday, priced at 60p, with a print run of around 170,000 copies and a front page splash

Harris said: "We were hoping for sales of anything over 60,000 copies, what we got was around 80,000, so I'm bloody delirious with that."

Asked if he thought sales would dip after an initial burst of launch interest, Harries said he, in fact, expected sales to rise.

"On the contrary, sales of the Sunday Sport rose through their first 10 weeks", he said. "Given that we have launched in the middle of August, traditionally a quiet time for newspaper sales, we think that 100,000 is obtainable in the bumper months of October and November."

The company was mulling the possible launch of a Friday edition of the paper in future months, Harris added, but any possible launch was dependent on the performance of the midweek paper.

David Sulivan's company Sunday Sport 2011 bought the rights to the Sunday Sport name after he struck a deal with the administrators for Sports Media Group (SMG), its previous owner, in April this year after it went out of business and the titles went out of print.

Sulivan, who launched the original Sunday Sport in 1986, took control of the paper for a second time after having previously sold his Sport titles to Interactive World, later renamed Sports Media Group, in 2007.

The Sunday Sport began publishing again on 8 May after his takeover.

Like the Sunday Sport, the Midweek Sport's point of difference to other titles will be its sensationalist stories and high quota of topless girls.

Advertisers in the paper are adult brands and the editorial content features "real-life" stories about "Britain behaving badly".