According to Initiative's most recent ViewerTrack, the UK is continuing to lose ground to the rest of Europe in the battle for World Cup TV audiences. This is in spite of England arguably having their best chance in recent years of winning the World Cup.
The UK World Cup audience was fourth highest in Europe by percentage of the population in 1998. By 2002, the UK had slipped to 10th place. Now, for the first 29 matches of Germany 2006, UK audiences are only 13th-highest in Europe, despite ITV1 and the BBC picking up healthy ratings.
Last night's game, which featured goals from Joe Cole and Steven Gerrard, against Sweden pulled in a peak of 20.9m for ITV1.
While the UK World Cup TV audience is growing, 25% more people are watching this year compared with 2002, the audiences in other European countries are growing even more rapidly.
Surprisingly, the relative lack of support for England in terms of in-home viewing in the UK is partly responsible.
In other European countries with teams playing in the World Cup, an average of 28% of the population has been watching their teams on TV. In the UK, only 18% of the population has watched England play so far, a difference of 10 percentage points.
These audiences may be deceptively low, however, given one quarter of the UK population lives outside of England. The Welsh, Scots and Irish are less likely to support the England team than the English, and hence are less likely to watch their matches on TV.
UK audiences may also have been forced down by the exceptionally warm weather, which has encouraged out-of-home viewing.
However, there is still plenty of time for UK audiences to recover their position in the European audience league, given England have already qualified for the second round.
In contrast to the UK and Europe, it is the South Americans who are leading the way. South America has been restored as the highest World Cup TV viewing region in 2006.
South America had previously enjoyed the highest World Cup audience by region in 1998, but was overtaken in 2002 by Asia-Pacific and Europe.
World Cup 2002 was very much the domain of Asia-Pacific, with TV audiences soaring to an average of 11 ratings a match, the highest of any region.
Audiences were boosted by Japan and South Korea jointly hosting the tournament, and South Korea enjoying unprecedented success on the pitch. By contrast, viewers in Europe and South America had to watch live matches at inconvenient times of day, depressing their average audiences to nine ratings and eight ratings respectively.
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