As England lost their seventh World Cup quarter-final in Qatar on Friday night in their 1-2 defeat to defending champions France, punters and football fans in England spent nearly £350 million in pubs across the country to watch the match.
Nearly 30,000 pubs in the country saw beer sales jump more than 50 percent on the country’s heaviest drinking day since December 2019, according to research firm GlobalData.
More than 23 million people in England watched the fae of the Harry Kane team against defending champion France, according to the data company. It was the largest TV sports audience in the country since last year’s Euro 2020 final between England and Italy.
According to The British Beer and Pub Association, kick-off at 7pm GST meant more punters and fans headed to the pubs to watch the game.
Earlier last month, GlobalData had found in a report that the average weekly wage of a British citizen bought a British fan eight pints during a 90-minute football match, in September 2022 fans could have bought just seven and a half pints of beer with the weekly wage.
Another analysis published by GlobalData had predicted that total UK retail and hospitality sales of the World Cup would be less than £2 billion if England reached the quarter-finals in Qatar. Expected sales were 43 percent less than the troughs of last year’s Euro Championships and 17 percent less than the 2018 World Cup.
According to an analysis by the Oxford Partnership, a provider of market intelligence in the UK, a total of 9.2 million pints of beer were sold on November 29, the day England faced Wales, an increase of 84 per cent compared to the same day of the year. week in four previous weeks.
“There is no doubt that in the run-up to Christmas, without the World Cup, pubs would be struggling. So it makes a big difference,” Margot West, COO, Oxford Partnership, had previously shared.