Paris spent Monday night under its first curfew of the unrest, and France’s prime minister says more are coming on Tuesday. Five days before the Steelers and Saints play the first regular-season NFL game in France, the league is sticking to its plan and selling the week as something bigger: a “mini-Super Bowl” for a country it wants to keep coming back to.
“It would make sense to play regularly here each year, but we haven’t made that call yet,” Brett Gosper, the NFL’s head of Europe and Asia-Pacific, said in an interview published on Tuesday. “We like to see how things go the first time, but we’re pretty confident it will be a successful execution of that game.”
What the curfews cover
The Paris police prefecture put two areas under a curfew from 11 p.m. on Monday, October 19, to 6 a.m. on Tuesday: the central square of Place de la République, where Saturday’s march began and the worst clashes took place, and the southern approaches to the Les Halles shopping district, which was looted on Saturday and again on Sunday night. Residents, people working in the zones, emergency services and shopkeepers were exempt.
A separate order banned undeclared gatherings from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. in wider areas: around the Élysée Palace, the Interior Ministry and the Champs-Élysées, the National Assembly, the Senate, Place d’Italie, Bastille and the Bourse, and outside every main railway station, including Gare du Nord, the hub for the suburban lines that serve the Stade de France. Partial curfews were also imposed in Lyon, Lille and other cities, and Nice set one for young people.
The night passed calmly, police and gendarmes said. On Tuesday morning Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote that the targeted curfews had “contributed to the calm” and that “tonight, new curfews will be decided where the situation requires it,” with prefects and mayors making the call on the ground. He has said a full curfew on entire cities is out of the question and has not ruled out a state of emergency if things get worse. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has conceded that police “lost control” on Saturday, and Commerce Minister Serge Papin puts the number of looted shops at about 3,000 nationwide.
The Paris orders expired at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, and none of them reached Saint-Denis, the stadium or the league’s fan sites. Nuñez has also confirmed that Tuesday night’s Champions League match between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona at the Parc des Princes goes ahead, the same match several Saints players have been invited to attend.
Saint-Denis closed its shops on Sunday
The stadium’s home town has not escaped the trouble. Saint-Denis mayor Bally Bagayoko ordered shops and venues open to the public to close on Sunday, October 18, after looters hit the town center the day before, including a shoe store. The local cinema, L’Écran, cancelled its Sunday evening screenings.
“The city condemns this damage: it hits the residents, the shopkeepers and the life of our neighborhoods first,” the mayor said. The town has urged merchants to secure their premises and report anything suspicious.
The league’s position
The NFL has not changed its line since Sunday: preparations for the game and its events “continue as scheduled,” it is working with local authorities on operations and security, both clubs get regular updates, and “there’s been no disruption or impact at league sites.” The Saints have been in France since Monday morning, based outside Versailles. The Steelers practice in Pittsburgh this week and fly out on Thursday.
Tight end Juwan Johnson said on Monday that the players’ approach is to travel in groups and stay clear of trouble spots.
Why the league calls it a ‘mini-Super Bowl’
Gosper made it plain that the week is about recruiting fans, not just staging a game. “The Super Bowl is your first meeting, normally, with new entrants, so if we can make this week as much like a Super Bowl as possible, a mini-Super Bowl, then we’ll hopefully recruit some new fans this week and that’s the whole goal,” he said.
He gave rare detail on the crowd. About 70% of the tickets were bought in France, around 20% in the United States, which he called a “particularly high U.S. inbound” compared with a typical London game, and the remaining 10% elsewhere in Europe. “We don’t announce sellouts, but the stadium is full,” he said of a venue that holds about 82,000.
France Télévisions treats Sunday as “a major national event,” Gosper said, and will put it on free-to-air television, as will the sports daily L’Équipe. The target is a place in French viewers’ top five sports. “We know if we get into that top five it starts paying back,” he said. “You do that by increasing the number of fans, engaging really well with them, being part of the local landscape, and that happens over time.”
Rugby is part of the pitch. Gosper, a former chief executive of World Rugby, said the familiarity with a contact sport helped the NFL in the UK and Australia and should help in France. “People are used to watching collisions and contact and enjoy that and like to see a different version of that,” he said. Antoine Dupont, the France rugby star, will be at the game. Kylian Mbappé has already pulled on shoulder pads and a helmet for a league video with Falcons running back Bijan Robinson.
The Saints settle in
New Orleans has leaned into the week. The club introduced two French mascots, Louis and Lily, on Monday, showed off game jerseys stitched with the Paris Game patch, and posted its first footage from France.
What comes next (Cairo time)
- Tuesday, October 20, 10 p.m.: PSG vs. Barcelona at the Parc des Princes, with Saints players invited; any new curfews for Tuesday night are decided by prefects and mayors during the day
- Thursday, October 22: the Steelers leave Pittsburgh
- Friday, October 23: NFL House at Pavillon Cambon Capucines opens, 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. (also Saturday), free with advance registration; PSG’s Hail Mary over the Seine; the Steelers arrive
- Saturday, October 24: Saints walk-through inside the Stade de France
- Sunday, October 25, 4:30 p.m.: Steelers vs. Saints kicks off (2:30 p.m. in Paris, after France turns its clocks back that morning)
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