At the 2026 World Cup, the advertising boards around the pitch carry the usual global brands and one newcomer. ExpressVPN, a virtual private network, has become an official supporter of the tournament, the first company of its kind to sponsor a World Cup. Its name runs along the touchline on the broadcast feeds in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
It’s a strange thing to advertise at a football match. A VPN is background software, the sort of product people pay for and then forget is running. Yet the companies that buy space at the World Cup have always been a decent guide to what the economy runs on, and a connectivity company on the touchline is a marker of where it has gone.
The ad space itself is some of the most expensive in sport. FIFA earned $7.57 billion in the four years that ended with Qatar 2022 and has budgeted $11 billion for the cycle ending in 2026, about a quarter of it from sponsorship. The boards around the pitch are part of what that money buys. They are digital now, and what they show changes by country. Replacement technology lets the same stretch of touchline display one advertiser to North America and another to Asia, and the German league runs up to five regional versions during a single match. Most viewers never know the board they’re watching is not the same one someone in another country sees.
The names on the boards have always tracked the economy behind them. For most of the last century they belonged to the Great Consumer Brands, the soft drinks and cigarettes and beers and cars and airlines of mass consumption; Coca-Cola has sponsored the World Cup since the 1970s. The money moved as the economy did, through the banks and credit cards of the financial decades and into the technology firms of the present one. Qualcomm’s chips are on the Manchester United shirt, Formula One’s grid is filling with cloud and AI partners, and the plumbing of the internet has begun buying its way into the game. ExpressVPN already sponsors Tottenham Hotspur; the World Cup is simply the category making its way to the grand stage.
VPNs are purchasing the ad spots because of how the tournament is now watched. Qatar 2022 reached about five billion people, most of them tuning in from outside the host country. The 2026 World Cup is the largest ever, with 48 teams and 104 matches across sixteen cities in three countries, and its audience is online and increasingly mobile. That audience is also, more and more, lost. In the United States the matches are divided between Fox and Telemundo (and their respective apps), with no single subscription covering both. A June survey found that 41% of Americans did not know where to watch the tournament and that 46% had already missed a game, looking. The problem grew big enough that the FCC opened an inquiry into how live sport got so hard to find.
This is the audience ExpressVPN is selling to, and its pitch is a plain one: encrypted traffic on the public networks travelers lean on, and servers in 105 countries for the many fans following their team from somewhere other than home. The tech company is also courting those fans directly, with a giveaway of 50 premium tickets to the quarterfinals, semifinals, and final; looking to attach its name to something more memorable than a board.
Produced in partnership with ExpressVPN.