Coronation Street and Emmerdale CANCELLED tonight as summer of soap schedule chaos begins
CORONATION Street and Emmerdale are cancelled tonight as the summer of soap schedule chaos begins.
Both ITV soaps have been pulled from schedules tonight to make way for a women’s World Cup qualifier between England and Spain.
Instead tonight’s episodes will air on Sunday night at 8pm and 8.30pm.
It is just the beginning of the schedule chaos that will affect all soaps for the next few months.
The Fifa World Cup 2026, which is being hosted across Canada, Mexico and America starts later this month.
And following ITV’s decision to have a soap power hour every night from 8pm until 9pm, Coronation Street and Emmerdale are going to be forced out of their slots for some of the games.
A source said: “It’s proving quite the headache behind the scenes.
“Soap fans have already had to get used to the new slots, which came in at the beginning of the year, so with more changes coming there’s a real fear they could lose more viewers.
“Airing the episodes on a Sunday just does not work and now with the new schedule it’s very unlikely they’ll be able to run before these big World Cup matches start.
“There are lots of discussions behind the scenes about what they can do.”
In previous years ITV put the episodes on streaming service ITVX each morning regardless of when it aired on the main channel but that led to confusion with viewers.
And more recently sporting matches have meant that some episodes have been cut entirely.
In other weeks episodes have been shifted to a Sunday evening slot as is the case with this week’s missing episodes.
The channel recently announced that its new soaps power hour schedule – along with its ITVX first broadcast pattern – had led to a huge surge in streaming viewers.
Streams for the soaps are up 48% year on year while Coronation Street and Emmerdale achieved their highest monthly streaming figures on record.
The soaps clocked up 65 million streams in January 2026, 10 million higher than the next nearest monthly total on record.
Corriedale was also ITV’s biggest programme in January, with an audience of 5.9 million across consolidated TV and streaming.
