ExpressVPN Goes All-In on World Cup 2026: Risky Fan Wi-Fi Habits, a Smarter Apple TV App and Week-1 Picks

The FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off this week — and ExpressVPN is unusually deep in it. The service is an Official Tournament Supporter in the US, Canada and Europe, complete with pitchside LED branding, and it has timed a wave of releases around the opening matches: new research into fans' risky Wi-Fi habits, a rebuilt Apple TV app and an AI upgrade. Here's the roundup, plus the week-one fixtures worth planning your evenings around.

25 pairs of World Cup tickets are up for grabs — including the Final

The partnership — ExpressVPN's largest sports deal to date, putting its name on LED pitch-side boards in front of an expected global audience of around 6 billion — comes with something tangible for fans: as Official Supporter of the FIFA World Cup 2026™, ExpressVPN is raffling off 25 pairs of Category 1 tickets to knockout-stage matches:

Entry is simple: any ExpressVPN subscription enters you automatically, with additional entries on the 1- and 2-year plans. The sweepstakes runs from June 10 through July 11 at 17:00 GMT, with prize draws phased across the window — so earlier entries are in the running for more draws.

To be clear on the details: the giveaway is run sitewide by ExpressVPN itself under its Official Supporter status — 25 lucky winners in total, drawn from all entries. Very few companies hand out World Cup Final tickets at all, which makes a VPN subscription an unusually cheap lottery ticket for anyone who was considering one anyway. (And per our review, there's a solid product attached — see the full ExpressVPN review.)

70% of fans would trust a Wi-Fi network by its name alone

The headline item is new ExpressVPN research into football fans' digital habits heading into the tournament. The survey of 6,000 fans across the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany and Spain found that more than 70% would trust a public Wi-Fi network based on its name alone.

That number deserves a moment. Creating a hotspot called "Stadium_Free_WiFi" or "FanZone_Guest" costs an attacker nothing and requires no skill — and seven in ten fans will connect without a second thought. Security researchers have been warning about a rise in cyber attacks around FIFA-related events; a million-visitor tournament is exactly the scalable hunting ground this kind of "evil twin" attack was made for.

The practical takeaway hasn't changed, but the data makes it concrete: on any network you didn't set up yourself — stadium, fan zone, hotel, airport — assume someone may be listening, and encrypt your traffic with a VPN before you do anything that matters.

Apple TV app rebuilt: protocols, favourites and a built-in speed test

ExpressVPN's Apple TV app — already one of the few native big-screen VPN apps, as we noted in our full ExpressVPN review — received a major refresh:

• Cleaner home screen with favourite locations front and centre — less navigation between matches
• Three new protocol options: WireGuard and OpenVPN (UDP/TCP) now sit alongside the in-house Lightway protocol — notable, since protocol choice used to be one of our review's few criticisms
• Built-in speed test, so you can verify a server before kick-off instead of during a counter-attack

The update is live on the App Store and included with existing subscriptions. For a tournament that many will watch via geo-shifted streams on the living-room TV, this is well-timed.

ExpressAI adds video analysis

On the AI side, ExpressVPN's Pro-tier assistant ExpressAI now accepts video uploads (MP4, MOV, WebM) and answers plain-language questions about the content — no manual scrubbing through footage. The update, powered by the Gemma 4 31B model, also brings a 256k context window for long documents and a reasoning mode for complex tasks, all inside ExpressAI's existing privacy protections. It ships at no extra cost to Pro users — pick Gemma from the model selector.

It's a reminder of where ExpressVPN is positioning itself: less a single-purpose VPN, more a privacy suite — consistent with the password manager and threat blocker we covered in our review.

Week 1: the matches worth your evening (June 11–17)

The tournament opened on 11 June with Mexico vs South Africa. Our picks for the first week:

Broadcast rights for these matches are sliced by country — which stream, which language and which commentary you get depends entirely on where the internet thinks you are. That, plus the Wi-Fi findings above, is why VPN demand spikes every tournament.

The takeaway

ExpressVPN's tournament push is more substance than sponsorship: the fan-behaviour data is genuinely useful, the Apple TV protocol additions fix a real gap, and the timing is no accident. If you're choosing a VPN for the next six weeks of football, our full ExpressVPN review covers speeds, streaming results and pricing in detail — and for a budget sports-focused alternative, see the PureVPN World Cup Pass.

Try it yourself

Every subscription enters you to win World Cup tickets — including the Final. Try ExpressVPN with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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