A positive COVID-19 test for Superstar Amanda Nunes — who holds two women’s division championship belts — put the kybosh on her bantamweight title fight with Julianna Peña. Meanwhile, No. 5 contender Jose Aldo and No. 9 Pedro Munhoz slid into the second slot of a five-fight card. Nunes will just have to wait for her next main event as UFC 265 goes down Saturday, August 7 at 10:00 pm in Houston. Watching UFC 265 in the United States will run you a $90 pay-per-view fee, plus a $60 yearly ESPN+ subscription. What if we told you that you could access the same stream — with Joe Rogan, Jon Anik, and Daniel Cormier commentating — for completely free instead? All you’ll need is a VPN.
How to Stream UFC 265 for Free
At the moment, the UFC has an exclusive five-year deal to live stream pay-per-view main events through ESPN+. But that’s just in the United States. UFC negotiates different deals to promote Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) all around the globe. For example, Polsat Sport carries the UFC in Poland, but that’s going to be with Polish-language commentary. Russia’s Wink channel will be in Russian, and likewise, Brazil’s Combate channel coverage of UFC 265 will be in Portuguese. These are paid local subscriptions anyways. In the Netherlands, you can actually watch the UFC for free using a service called Kijk.nl. It’s estimated that nearly 93% of the Netherlands population speaks English, so Kijk.nl uses the American broadcast of UFC pay-per-view main events and all other UFC matchups. Accessing this stream is easy; you just need to download a VPN. As far as a recommendation, we’ll say that ExpressVPN is the heavyweight champ of cross-border sports streaming.
Step-by-step guide: How to watch UFC 265 for free with a VPN
Can You Use a Free VPN to Stream UFC?
You can, but be careful here. While free VPNs will save you on subscription costs, there are a lot of ways you could end up paying one way or another. Free VPNs oftentimes have the problems and issues listed below.
Limited bandwidth: If you use a free VPN, you’re probably going to have slow internet speeds. That’s because thousands of users are jammed together on the network, competing for bandwidth. How do you get more speed? You can pay for an upgrade, or settle for a pixilated and buffering UFC 265 stream while another user does.
Limited numbers of servers: In order to stream Derrick Lewis vs. Ciryl Gane, you’re going to need a server based in the Netherlands, and there’s no guarantee that a free provider will have one there. ExpressVPN has over 3,000 servers across 94 countries, including the Netherlands. Another of our favorite VPNs, CyberGhost, has an overwhelming number of more than 7,000 servers in 91 different countries.
Traffic limits: Sometimes you’ll sign up for a free VPN with lightning-fast, blazing speeds, and it also has a decent number of servers scattered all over the globe. Security protocols are even top-tier! So you start live-streaming UFC 265, and after the first few preliminary bouts, you get a message saying: “You have reached your daily traffic limit.” If you don’t buy a subscription or extra traffic data, you’re out of luck.
No privacy: Free VPN services aren’t usually in the game just to promote internet freedom — they want to make money somehow. How do they do that? Well, they can log and sell your activity to third parties and advertisers. People don’t use VPNs just to unblock content; they use them for anonymous browsing, privacy protection, and security. True-blue VPN providers don’t keep any logs of user activities, and can’t sell any of your personal information because there’s nothing there to sell.
If you’d like to avoid these pitfalls, we’d recommend going with a premium provider. If ExpressVPN isn’t in your budget, make sure to check out our 3 Best Cheap VPNs of 2021. All three have servers in the Netherlands.
UFC 265: Main Card
At the time of writing, the DraftKings Sportsbook has Ciryl Ganes as the -365 favorite to snag the interim heavyweight belt from Derrick Lewis, the +280 underdog in his own hometown. The first fight of the main card, a bantamweight bout between unranked fighters Song Yadong and Casey Kenney, kicks off at 10 pm (EST) from the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. The main event — Lewis vs. Gane — is expected around midnight.
