Wales Loves Euro 2016

There’s a whole lot of love going on in Wales at the moment, thanks to Euro 2016. And it seems the passionate support for our national team is matched by our love for gathering around a screen to watch them, or so the stats tell us.

Tickets for the fanzone at the Principality Stadium - supported by BBC Wales - were all gone in less than 90 minutes as fans made their plans for the semi-final. Those electric goal celebrations captured by BBC Wales news cameras at earlier fanzone matches suggest it could be quite a night.

The love doesn’t end there. Even the stars of the new Doctor Who series, Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas - who don’t pretend to be Welsh, but are happily filming here - have been brushing up their Welsh to say a heartfelt ‘pob lwc’ to our boys (’da iawn a diolch’ to them).

As well as reliving those glorious goals, we’ve also been looking closely at the remarkable figures from last weekend’s incredible quarter-final against Belgium. They show that even more history was made that Friday night as in-home viewing peaked at 1.27 million people in Wales, the highest ever reported TV audience in Wales for live sport.

We’re still working out how many others watched the match beyond their own front rooms. Initial indications suggest there were another couple of hundred thousand fans avidly watching in pubs, clubs or fanzones across Wales. That’s as well, of course, as the tens of thousands of Welsh fans that made it to France to support the team. And apparently well over 80% of the whole population say they were interested in the result of the match.

The in-home BBC1 peak audience was the third highest TV audience in Wales this century, only exceeded by the 2012 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies (1.43m and 1.33m respectively).

The Wales v Belgium TV figure was around double the previous record this century for a Wales international football match. Before Euro 2016, the highest audience was a peak of 640,000 on BBC One during Wales v Russia in November 2003. Going further even back in time, the highest audience in the previous decade was the Wales v Romania World Cup qualifier in November 1993, which had an average BBC One audience of 671,000 (we don’t have the peak audience for that match but it’s a safe bet that it would have been around 800,000).

Only time will tell, but I suspect the record may be broken by the figures for tonight’s semi-final. It’s been shown by ITV this time but will still, of course, be live again on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru, as well as the BBC Wales-produced coverage on S4C.

Whatever happens, if Wales make it to the final, we might be breaking even more records on Sunday night.