ITV says its biggest-yet World Cup is a ‘six-week Super Bowl’ for advertising

Broadcaster reveals revenues from expanded tournament are running about 30% higher than for Euro 2024

The channel is airing 51 of the 104 matches across the men’s tournament, co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, which is the biggest yet after an expansion from 32 to 48 teams.

“This will be our most commercially successful tournament ever,” said Williams. “It is not just one game but six weeks of really big TV audiences. It is effectively our six-week summer Super Bowl moment.”

ITV began selling commercial packages for the World Cup last autumn, with Google taking the headline sponsorship to promote its Gemini and Pixel products. However, it is holding back prime slots around games later in the tournament, which can demand hefty premiums if England progress to the later stages.

The broadcaster does not break out the cost of individual ads but media industry sources estimate that a 30-second commercial in an England game can cost as much as £300,000 .

Williams said that at the last World Cup, when there were only 64 matches in total, a typical game averaged 6 million viewers, while those involving England peaked at 20-25 million, depending on the stage of the tournament.

One of those is Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone lager brand, which booked slots after the huge media coverage produced by the success of the Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir winning Britain’s Got Talent last month.

The most high-profile ad campaign is Nike’s World Cup ad which, at six minutes, will be the longest commercial ever aired on TV in the UK. The ad of superstar footballers, which will air for the first time during England’s opening match against Croatia, features Cole Palmer, who did not make the squad.

The media regulator, Ofcom, limits the number of minutes of ads a broadcaster is allowed to air in an hour, but this rule works on an average so ITV is able toadjust its overall ad allocation to run the full Nike commercial.

However, while ITV expects to see a boost from audiences watching Scotland’s progress, the times of the group matches are much more unsociable, at either 11pm or 2am.

The BBC has the rights to air the remaining World Cup matches in the UK.

ITV has set up a glitzy studio in Brooklyn, with views of the Manhattan skyline, while the BBC has opted to broadcast out of its studios in Salford, Manchester.

The former lead BBC football presenter, Gary Lineker, has signed a reported £14m deal with Netflix to stream daily versions of his lucrative The Rest Is Football podcast from a studio in downtown New York.

Lineker left the BBC last May , after another row about his social media posts, having been due to host his seventh World Cup.

In April, he said he would have been “in Salford in a green box” instead of “overlooking Times Square with lots of great guests”.

On Tuesday, Alex Kay-Jelski, the director of BBC Sport, unveiled its studio set-up and defended the decision to be based in the UK , saying “the actual end product that people are getting at home, I don’t really think it’s that different”.