The 2026 World Cup playoffs are in full swing — and if free broadcasts are unavailable in your region, you have to pay. However, copyright protection often hits not only your wallet but also the stability of your connection.
We explain how the fight against football piracy is breaking the internet and how VPN services restore access to content.
Who Shows the Tournament and How
To understand the nature of blockages implemented by platforms, it is important to grasp the context in which the World Cup broadcasting rights are distributed. FIFA sells them on a country-by-country basis, so the picture varies from region to region. In some places, matches are only available on paid platforms, while in others, they are broadcast live by public television — for free and open to everyone.
For instance, residents of Kazakhstan, Poland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands — locations available within Amnezia Premium — can watch World Cup matches without a subscription. To do this, however, you need to connect from local IP addresses.
The answer to the question “how to watch the 2026 World Cup football matches” depends on the country. In Brazil, the CazéTV channel shows all 104 matches on YouTube in 4K — as expected of the five-time champions. In Australia, public station SBS has been broadcasting the World Cup since 1986. In Germany, FIFA gives part of the matches to ARD and ZDF for free.
In practice, many of these “open” broadcasts are only accessible to those who are physically located in the country. A fan from another region visits the website, launches the player, and sees the message: “The broadcast is unavailable in your region.”
For example, BBC iPlayer and ITVX in the UK, Australian SBS, and German ARD/ZDF formally show the tournament for free, but when connecting via a VPN, they either block access immediately or ask you to disable the application at the final registration step. Belgian RTBF Auvio and VRT MAX require connecting from within the country.
Broadcasting rights for the World Cup are valued at approximately $4B, and copyright holders do everything they can to keep exclusive content on their half of the field. The problems begin when protection methods strike blindly.
How World Cup Broadcasts and Internet Blockages Are Connected
In June of this year, the European branch of the CCIAComputer & Communications Industry Association, which represents the interests of Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare, criticized the practice of filtering traffic by IP addresses and DNS.
Representatives of the CCIA argue that sports tournaments should not turn into a testing ground for automated filtering, and any restrictive measures must go through an independent court
Since thousands of resources share a single IP address or DNS node, legitimate websites get blocked along with pirate ones due to erroneous filtering. For instance, in 2025, the Redsys payment system was temporarily unavailable in Spain due to a filtering error. A year earlier, in neighboring Italy, a similar initiative called Piracy Shield cut off access to Google Drive.
The fact is that copyright holders increasingly pass the supervision to commercial structures: the Spanish La Liga itself generates lists of resources to be restricted — without transparent criteria or the right to appeal.
Pressure is also growing on internet service providers, who face fines both for a “slow reaction” and for accidentally blocking something wrong. To avoid legal trouble, they resort to controversial measures. For example, specialists from the OONI network observatory documented TLS MitM attacksAn attack in which an adversary intercepts encrypted traffic at the transport layer, decodes it, and then returns it to the network against more than 10,000 domains.
The provider intercepted clients’ encrypted traffic to prevent them from watching football
The scale of blockages caused by La Liga’s policies surpasses the results of some censorship agencies. According to data from the aforementioned OONI, out of 9M domains tested over six months, more than 500,000 — nearly 6% — fell under restrictions at some point.
The list of blocked resources looks more like a cross-section of the internet as a whole: human rights organizations, news, religious and government portals, as well as eco-activists and chat platforms — La Liga spared no one in its fight against pirates.
In some cases, blocking a dozen addresses took down up to 400,000 websites. The infrastructure of major providers suffered: AWS, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, Akamai, Meta, and Microsoft.
In the fight against illegal broadcasts, copyright holders go up the network infrastructure chain and compile “blacklists” of hosting providers that ignore requests to remove pirated content.
Watch Sports Broadcasts with Amnezia VPN
Amnezia Premium is a privacy and security network service with servers in 20 countries, including Kazakhstan, Poland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. It will protect your data and connection on public Wi-Fi networks, as well as allow you to support your favorite team from anywhere on the planet — even after the final whistle on July 19.
The subscription will also come in handy next season: the service works even in difficult regions, supports up to seven devices, and restores access to your selected online resources anywhere on the planet.
Connect to Amnezia Premium — and follow key moments securely
The availability of streaming services depends on your location and the ToS of each broadcaster. The user is solely responsible for compliance with applicable legislation and the ToS of third-party services. AmneziaVPN is not affiliated with FIFA, broadcasters, or other copyright holders; all mentioned names are provided for informational purposes
6 min
