How To Watch Wimbledon Online From Abroad

Perhaps the greatest event in tennis, Wimbledon captures the hearts and minds of enthusiasts from around the world… but how do you watch Wimbledon outside the UK?

How To Watch Wimbledon Online

How to watch Wimbledon from abroad is a question we hear from expats every summer. The tournament is televised worldwide, but coverage is fragmented: each country's broadcaster holds rights only for its own territory, not every channel shows every match, and in some places the coverage sits behind an expensive subscription while being free elsewhere. In the UK, the BBC has broadcast Wimbledon for decades and streams its extensive coverage free on BBC iPlayer — but iPlayer checks your IP address and refuses to play outside the UK.

The answer is a VPN. Connect to a Le VPN server in the UK and BBC iPlayer sees a British connection; any Le VPN UK server works for the BBC. Prefer another country's coverage — say, a US sports network you subscribe to? Connect to a server there instead. Le VPN has servers in 100+ locations, so you can follow the Championships through whichever broadcaster suits you, at whatever hour the matches reach your time zone.

How To Watch Wimbledon From A Censored Country

A VPN does more than swap your apparent location. It routes your traffic through an encrypted tunnel, which means:

• Networks that block sports streaming or foreign media can't see what you're watching, and Le VPN's Stealth WireGuard protocol can disguise the VPN connection itself in countries that use deep packet inspection to block VPNs.
• Your ISP can't identify your stream as video, so it can't throttle it during the finals.
• Your logins and data are protected on hotel and public Wi-Fi while you travel.

Setup takes minutes: subscribe, install the app, pick a UK server, and check your new location on the test your IP page before play begins. One account covers up to 5 devices simultaneously, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase.

What Is Wimbledon?

To properly appreciate the Wimbledon Championships — officially "The Championships, Wimbledon" — it helps to know where they came from. Wimbledon itself is a district in southwest London, in the Borough of Merton, roughly seven miles from Charing Cross. Beyond the tennis, it offers a lively town center, the New Wimbledon Theatre, and Wimbledon Common, one of London's largest public green spaces.

The Championships are the oldest tennis tournament in the world and widely considered the most prestigious. They are held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, played on grass courts, and form one of the sport's four Grand Slams alongside the French Open, the Australian Open and the US Open. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam still played on grass. The tournament runs for two weeks in late June and early July, culminating in the Ladies' and Gentlemen's Singles finals — the highest-rated televised tennis matches in the world.

The club was founded in 1868 as the All England Croquet Club; lawn tennis was added to the name after the new sport won over the members. The first Championship was held on July 9, 1877, with a single event — the Gentlemen's Singles — where about 200 spectators paid a shilling apiece to watch Spencer Gore triumph over a field of 22. The rules drawn up for that first event are essentially the basis of tennis rules today. Like the other Grand Slams, Wimbledon was an amateur affair until the "Open" era began in 1968, when professionals entered the field and quickly came to dominate it.

Wimbledon is famous for its traditions: the strict all-white dress code for players (which has tripped up stars from the Williams sisters onward), royal patronage, strawberries and cream, and a near-total absence of courtside advertising.

Wimbledon, The Events

The Championships have come a long way from the days of a single Gentlemen's Singles draw. Today they feature the five main events — Gentlemen's and Ladies' Singles, Gentlemen's and Ladies' Doubles, and Mixed Doubles — plus junior events, wheelchair events, and invitational draws for past champions.

Match play in the main draws is single elimination: one loss and you're out. The singles draws each admit 128 players — most entering directly on ranking, a handful via wild cards chosen by the club, and the rest through a qualifying event held the week before at Roehampton. Seeding follows the world rankings, and upsets are part of the tournament's magic: unseeded and qualifier runs deep into the second week are rare enough that each one becomes legend, as Boris Becker and Goran Ivanišević proved in their day.

The courts are sown with 100% perennial ryegrass for durability. Centre Court, with a capacity of about 15,000 and its famous Royal Box, hosts both singles finals and is protected by a retractable roof, so rain no longer wipes out the showpiece matches; No. 1 Court, seating over 11,000, gained its own roof as well. The modern No. 2 Court sits partly below ground level thanks to local planning rules, while the old No. 2 Court earned the nickname "Graveyard of Champions" for the number of top seeds eliminated on it. Fans without show-court tickets gather on the grassy hill beside No. 1 Court — famously dubbed "Henman Hill" in the late 1990s — to watch the action on a giant screen.

Game, Set, Stream

Now you know everything about the history of Wimbledon — and, more importantly, how to watch Wimbledon online from anywhere in the world. Connect to a UK server with Le VPN, open BBC iPlayer, and settle in for two weeks of the best tennis on earth. Enjoy!