Has your area gone football-mad? We've mapped World Cup viewing

Has your area gone football‑mad? We've mapped World Cup viewing By Phil Leake, Data journalist and Rachel Standish, Data analyst Fans have cheered and despaired at the World Cup’s most breathtaking and nail‑biting moments in pubs, watch parties and living rooms across the country, though some places have embraced the tournament more enthusiastically than others. We examined BBC iPlayer viewing figures to determine where the competition attracted the greatest interest. The data encompass every piece of World Cup content available on iPlayer – live matches, highlights and analysis programmes – but exclude games shown solely on ITV. A map of postcode areas below illustrates the proportion of signed‑in iPlayer users who watched BBC World Cup material between 11 June and 7 July; darker shading denotes higher levels of engagement. London emerged as the tournament’s viewing capital, with 13 of the top 14 postcode areas for iPlayer viewing situated in and around the city. Nearly two‑thirds (64 %) of UK iPlayer accounts streamed at least some World Cup coverage, a figure that climbs to almost 80 % in the principal localities of Southall, Ilford and East London. Outside the capital, Manchester recorded the highest‑ranking postcode district, followed by Luton, Oldham and Birmingham. Matches featuring England and Scotland have consistently split audiences along the border. Scottish households were less inclined to tune in for England games than those in Wales and Northern Ireland, even though neither nation qualified for the finals. This pattern was echoed in England: neither of Scotland’s two BBC fixtures – versus Haiti and Brazil – appeared among the five most‑watched group‑stage games for English postcodes. England’s dramatic 3‑2 victory over Mexico kicked off at 02:00 BST on Monday morning and shattered TV records for a live broadcast at that hour. Conversely, viewers in London’s eight interior postcode areas did not watch live or catch up in the same numbers as the rest of the nation. Instead, Blackburn, Oldham, Bolton, Birmingham, Bradford, Sunderland and Wolverhampton each broke into the top 10, while several London zones barely cracked the top 100. Beyond home‑nation fixtures, kick‑off times and star power exerted a notable influence on audience size. France’s opener against Senegal, which aired in a primetime slot (20:00 BST) and featured Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé, attracted the second‑largest UK audience, trailing only England‑Ghana. Portugal’s encounter with DR Congo and Argentina’s match versus Austria also ranked among the most‑watched, aided by early