PARIS — What do Aaron Rodgers, Jay-Z and Pope Leo XIV have in common? Come Sunday, they’ll all have performed in front of a sold-out crowd at the Stade de France this fall.
While the NFL has increased its presence in Europe in recent years, Sunday’s game between the Saints and Steelers will be the first NFL game of any kind played in France. Paris was not chosen as a host city when the NFL first began playing overseas preseason games in the 1980s and ’90s, nor did it have a team in the now-defunct NFL Europe league. But as the most populous metropolitan area on the continent, it was only a matter of time before the NFL came calling.
The man overseeing the league’s expansion on the continent is Brett Gosper, the NFL’s head of Europe and Asia-Pacific. He’s only been on the job since 2021, so he can’t speak to why it’s taken so long for the NFL to come to France, but he’s eager to bring the game to a new audience for the first time.
“I don’t know what the context was back then, I think maybe there was a language, cultural thing that doesn’t exist now. Perhaps more people spoke English in Germany than they did in France,” Gosper says with a laugh. “The point is, right now we think it’s a fantastic place to host an NFL game. We know it’s got a very strong and passionate fan base and we know it has huge potential to grow its fan base.”
There’s no better stadium for the NFL’s French debut than the Stade de France. With more than 81,000 seats, it’s the largest stadium in the country and the fifth-largest in Europe. It’s hosted a FIFA World Cup, two Rugby World Cups and the 2024 Olympics, as well as three UEFA Champions League finals and the World Athletics Championships.
Originally built for the 1998 World Cup, the stadium on the outskirts of Paris is France’s national stadium. (The name, which was originally suggested by French soccer legend Michel Platini, literally translates to “France’s stadium”—a purposeful statement of whom the venue belongs to and what it’s used for. It’s also owned by the French government.) Unlike many other stadiums that the NFL has used abroad, the Stade de France has no permanent tenant. It’s used most frequently by the national soccer and rugby teams, but its primary role is to play host to any major event that comes to France—whether that’s a global concert tour, the Olympics, a visit from the Holy Father or, for the first time, an NFL game. The Steelers-Saints game is one of nearly 40 events that will be held at the stadium this year, the most in its history.
Though the stadium has never hosted American football before, the prior experience of hosting so many different events has helped make the preparation for the NFL go more smoothly. The biggest changes will be swapping out the natural grass field used for soccer and replacing it with a hybrid surface (a mix of natural grass and synthetic fibers similar to what was used at the World Cup in the U.S. this summer), installing the goal posts and renovating the locker rooms to accommodate the larger NFL rosters.
When Sports Illustrated visited Paris in late September to film the latest edition of our Stadium Wonders video series, the stadium was a hive of activity as crews were hard at work preparing not for the NFL game that was at that point less than four weeks away, but for a pair of France men’s national team soccer games to be held later that week. It was four days after the Pope’s visit. After Sunday’s game, crews will get to work on readying the stadium for a men’s rugby national team against South Africa in less than three weeks.
France is unique in that its population is more heavily concentrated around the capital than other countries. The Paris metro area represents about 3.5% of the country’s land area but is home to more than 20% of its population. So while “France’s stadium” may be in Paris, it truly is a destination for the whole country, nearly every corner of which is connected to Paris by an extensive high-speed rail network. But the stadium’s reach also extends well beyond France.
“Basically every single person—fans of the rugby national team, football national team or concerts—they are used to coming to Paris,” Stade de France deputy CEO Julien Rongier told me as we stood in the upper reaches of the stadium. “But I would say it’s not just national markets. We are a highlight in the touring [schedule] for national acts [and] international acts. People from Spain, people from Benelux [Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg], people from Germany even, they come even from the U.K.—they come to Paris to enjoy [a] show and enjoy [their] weekend.”
NFL games abroad always attract plenty of tourists, but the league is expecting even more people to travel for the Paris game—as many as 20% Americans, up from the 10–15% the league usually sees for international games. Even with the increased American presence, the league is still anticipating that at least 70% of attendees will be French, with the remaining percentage made up of fans from other parts of Europe.
While France has not previously been a focus for the NFL, the league believes there is potential to build strong fandom there.
“There’s a high percentage of the population [who are] sports fans, and obviously the infrastructure in France for big events has been proven for any sporting event,” Gosper says. “I think people outside of France are interested in what’s happening in France. It’s one of those countries, there’s a handful of those in the world that people sort of look into out of curiosity and history and so on.”
The Saints are the only NFL team permitted under the NFL’s Global Markets Program to promote themselves in France. (They also added Italy to their international territory this year, becoming, along with the Browns, the first franchises to be granted marketing rights in that country.) It’s a logical pairing, given Louisiana’s history as a former French colony, but backstory alone can’t turn Parisians into Falcons-hating New Orleans football fans.
“For us, of course, we believe that the story, the history between New Orleans and France might be interesting to people, and we are trying to storytell why people in New Orleans love France so much and why we are historically and economically intertwined,” says Jan Woska, the Saints’ international relations liaison. “But eventually we learned that this [alone] will not win the French fans for us.”
It’s an uphill battle. Data shows that American football is the 11th-most popular sport in France, according to Woska, behind sports such as judo, swimming and fencing. Woska, who is originally from the Czech Republic, knows firsthand how challenging it can be for those who weren’t raised on football to grasp the game. One way the Saints are hoping to facilitate engagement in American football is by promoting flag football, which has become a major focus for the NFL in recent years. Flag football is safer than tackle football, has been more widely adopted by girls and women and will be an Olympic sport for the first time in 2028. Gosper says that flag football is “a big part of our fan acquisition strategy” and introducing young people to that version of the game is “a very strong and sticky and engaging part” of turning them into NFL fans. The Saints are actively collaborating with the Fédération Française de Football Américain (the national governing body) to grow flag football in France, including providing financial support to a tournament where the winning team earned a trip to New Orleans.
“You must showcase that you are doing something for them, like the flag football tournament that will ultimately get some French kids to New Orleans,” Woska says. “But also you have to be winning on the field because most of the French fans, if they weren’t following the Saints, they will not just start to follow them now just because we explain the history.”
The Saints are also tapping into the existing tackle football market in the country, modest though it may be. They formed a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Paris Musketeers, a team in the European Football Alliance that was coached by former Saints player and assistant coach Jack Del Rio. Demario Davis, then a linebacker for the Saints, and team owner Gayle Benson traveled to Paris to attend a Musketeers game last year. A few months later, 50 Musketeers players, coaches and staff members attended a Saints game in New Orleans.
France may not have a long history with American football the way neighboring Germany does, but it’s quite fond of one of the game’s ancestors. Rugby has been played in France for more than 150 years and is among the most popular sports in the country. The men’s national team has won the prestigious Six Nations tournament (an annual competition between Europe’s top teams) eight times in the last 25 years, and the women’s team has advanced to the semifinals at eight of the 10 Women’s Rugby World Cups. The two sports are vastly different, but there are enough similarities that the NFL sees interest in rugby as an asset in acquiring fans in places where that game is popular.
“My view is it does [help build interest in the NFL], because I think the rugby fraternity is very respectful and admirative of the athleticism of the athletes, the engagement, the physical nature of it,” says Gosper, an Australian who was formerly the CEO of World Rugby, the sport’s global governing body. “So there’s a natural curiosity. But rugby occupies the market, so therefore [in terms of building] fandom and so on, there’s some lifting to do. But we’ve seen in the U.K., we’ve seen in Australia, in other markets where there’s a contact sport, it tends to help us, not hinder us. And people [there] who haven’t discovered American football before relate very well to a contact sport like American football.”
Football is far from top of mind for French people right now, though. Sunday’s game will take place against the backdrop of widespread anti-government protests across the nation. The protests, which started on Sept. 18, began as a response to poor conditions at the nation’s high schools. Students have said there are rodents and insects in school buildings, and that classrooms lack sufficient heating and air conditioning. They’re also weary of excessively long school days, which can stretch from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., a lack of basic supplies like desks and chairs, and frustrated with staffing shortages, according to the BBC. They say a lack of government funding is to blame for the issues.
The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, where the stadium is located, has the highest poverty rate in mainland France and has been a focal point for the protests. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg joined a protest last week at the Lycée Paul-Éluard, a school less than two miles from the stadium. While the protests have been mostly peaceful, demonstrations last weekend were marred by violence as cars burned and stores were looted. At least two people died and 2,000 were arrested.
On Monday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu gave cities permission to begin instituting curfews. Several large cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille, announced bans on public gatherings. Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League match between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona was played without disruption, however.
The NFL has said on multiple occasions that it expects Sunday’s game to proceed as planned. The league said Tuesday that it will increase security for the game, similar to what it did for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans in February 2025, a month after a terror attack in the city’s French Quarter. Peter O’Reilly, NFL executive VP of club business, international and league events, told reporters at the NFL owners meetings in New York that the league never considered canceling the Paris game and that it believes holding the game will not have any impact on the government’s ability to deploy local resources in response to potential continued unrest.
When I asked Gosper last week about whether the league is concerned that the protesters might turn their attention to the game and the government-owned stadium, he said that the league expected “a calming of the situation” and that there was “no history of disrupting sporting events in France.”
As of now, it appears that the game will proceed as planned in Paris on Sunday. It’ll be the first NFL game played in the country, but certainly not the last. When I asked Rongier about the prospect of a recurring partnership between the NFL and Stade de France, he held up a pair of crossed fingers.
“Yeah, let’s hope,” he said. “I mean, we are building a strong relationship at every single level of our operations. I hope they’re gonna like the way we welcome them and we do all the enhancements and all the features they need, because we are really used to welcoming the national team. But welcoming American football teams, it’s a bit different and it’s huge.”
France doesn’t have the same longstanding American football community that Germany does, or the longstanding relationship with the NFL that London does, but the opportunity for growth there is simply too significant for the league to pass up. The population in Paris is large, young and diverse. More people live in the Paris region than any metro area in the U.S. other than New York. Converting even a small percentage of those people to NFL fandom would be a massive windfall for the league.
And it’s not as though Parisians are unfamiliar with other American imports. The first thing I saw when I emerged from the subway on my way from the airport was a KFC. Behind me was a McDonalds. One night, the movie theater near my hotel had a line hundreds of people deep waiting to see the rereleased Avengers: Endgame. I ate dinner at a classic French bistro on a cobblestone street, directly across from a Dunkin’. I swear more people wear Yankees hats in Paris than they do in New York. So maybe it’s possible that Chris Olave jerseys will become the new Parisian fashion statement.
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