Steelers Beat Saints 16-10 in the NFL’s First Paris Game: What the Debut Actually Showed
The NFL got its game in Paris. Whether it got the showcase it wanted is a different question.
Pittsburgh beat New Orleans 16-10 at the Stade de France on Sunday in front of an announced 78,488, the first regular-season NFL game ever played in France. It was decided by field goals and a red-zone interception, which is not the product the league would have ordered for 78,000 mostly first-time customers.
What Happened
Aaron Rodgers went 19 of 30 for 212 yards with a touchdown and no interceptions. The touchdown, a 4-yarder to tight end Darnell Washington in the first half, was the 540th of his career and moved him past Peyton Manning into third place all time.
Chris Boswell kicked three field goals. Jaylen Warren carried 18 times for 101 yards and was the best offensive player on the field. The decisive play came on the Saints’ first possession after halftime, when linebacker Payton Wilson intercepted Tyler Shough in the red zone on a short throw meant for Chris Olave, ending a 14-play drive.
Shough threw it well enough, 30 of 38 for 278 yards and a fourth-and-goal touchdown to Devaughn Vele that tied the game at 10. New Orleans ran for 18 yards. Eighteen, as a team. Daniel Carlson then missed a 52-yard field goal wide right in the fourth quarter.
Pittsburgh is 5-2 in Mike McCarthy’s first season after Mike Tomlin stepped down. New Orleans is 2-5 and heads into its bye. Kellen Moore was not interested in reacting fast. “We got to dig into it. We got to evaluate it,” he said, and on whether staff changes were coming: “I’m not going to jump to anything right now.”
The Week Around the Game Was the Harder Story
Paris spent the weekend in the middle of mass protests that began in September over school conditions and widened into anger over the cost of living and Emmanuel Macron’s government. The Interior Ministry put Saturday’s turnout at 410,000 nationwide and 110,000 in Paris, with more than 70,000 police and gendarmes deployed. The CGT union says the real figures are nearly double. Close to 1,000 people were arrested nationwide.
Almost everything around the game came off the schedule. All three of the NFL’s Saturday fan events were cancelled. NFL House closed. The Steelers scrapped a Bastille fan event on Thursday for security reasons. Saints House was pushed to Sunday. The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay closed. Police asked Ligue 1 to move PSG against Lyon off Sunday entirely.
The game itself never moved. NFL executive Peter O’Reilly said the league had “confidence in the plans both from an ops and security standpoint.” Roger Goodell said he had been in contact with the State Department and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. President Donald Trump said he was worried about it and that “I would’ve said the NFL could’ve probably postponed that match, if you want to know the truth.” Rodgers, asked about it Friday, said: “If it was unsafe, then I’m sure we wouldn’t be here.”
Nine Games and Counting
Paris was the sixth of nine international games this season, the most the league has ever staged, across four continents and seven countries. Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro were also new this year. Madrid, Munich and Mexico City are still to come in November.
Goodell has been plain about where this goes. “If we can get to 16 we’re fairly close,” he said of international games, and “we’re not coming into these games to play one game, we want to use it as a launchpad.” He raised an international franchise and an international division as open questions, and said Tokyo is “clearly on our list.”
New Orleans was the home team because the Saints have held NFL marketing rights in France since 2023, the only club that does. The league counts more than 14 million fans in the country. Jan Woska, the Saints’ international relations liaison, has been honest about the limits of the Louisiana-France pitch, saying the organization eventually learned that history alone would not win French fans and that you have to be winning on the field. The Saints are 2-5.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
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