An average of just 9,000 viewers in Britain tuned in to Sky Sports 3’s coverage of Saturday’s Connacht football semi-final between Galway and Sligo. The live attendance at the match was only marginally smaller at 8,250.

According to figures supplied to The Irish Times, the television audience for the match peaked at 22,000.

Ninety minutes of the two-and-a-half hour broadcast clashed with World Cup matches in Brazil, firstly Argentina-Iran and later Germany-Ghana.

Sky is not the main rights holder in the British market, as Premier Sports supplies coverage of all televised championship matches apart from those to which Sky has exclusive access.

It is believed that Premier’s broadcast of the Munster hurling semi-final between Cork and Clare the previous weekend attracted roughly the same audience as Sky did last Saturday but without BSkyB’s big subscriber base, estimated to be about 10,000,000 in total although there are no separate figures available for subscriptions to Sky Sports.

In Ireland the Galway-Sligo broadcast drew an average audience of 18,000, peaking at 60,000.

That is the same as the average audience that watched the Wexford-Dublin Leinster hurling semi-final, which was down from the 32,000 that tuned in for the first Sky broadcast at the start of the month, the Kilkenny-Offaly Leinster hurling quarter-final.

These figures are for Irish residential subscribers only – not including those watching in HD – and do not include those who watched the match in pubs or in Britain.