The Euros 2024 Championship has given the British economy a £3.1bn boost as football fever swept through the UK.
Football fans are estimated to have spent at least £405m before of last night’s final between England and Spain, according to research from VoucherCodes.
Retailers are estimated to have received a £280.1m boost, with the majority spent in supermarkets on last-minute food and drink for the game, The Telegraph reported.
Tesco, which closed its Express stores several hours earlier on Sunday (14 July), said it was anticipating selling more than one million pizzas and 180,000 packs of burgers over the weekend, as well as around four million packs of beer and cider.
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Similarly, Sainsbury’s estimated that beer sales would triple over the weekend, with sales of sparkling wine and ready-to-drink cocktail cans already up 30%.
Asda said that it had already sold over 20,000 large screen ultra-high-definition TVs during the 2024 Euros, and was expecting to shift more before the weekend’s game.
British Retail Consortium director Kris Hamer said: “After success against the Netherlands, we expect more people across England to tune into Sunday’s finals, meaning more spending on snacks and drinks, and potentially an uptick in TV sales as households try to watch the big game on even bigger screens.”
The increase in sales over the month-long tournament comes after the latest figures from BRC showed that retail sales slipped 0.2% last month, against a growth of 4.9% in June 2023, as the late June heatwave failed to offset dampened consumer spending across the earlier part of the month.
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