When Alvin Kamara got talking about Paris, the reaction around him was immediate. The people with him said Stade de France was the nicest stadium in the country.
Kamara sounded ready for the moment, too.
“I’m definitely excited for the scenery and to be a part of it,” Kamara said. “It’s the first NFL game being played in France.”
That matchup puts the New Orleans Saints inside a venue that feels like a French counterpart to the Caesars Superdome. Stade de France, with its 81,338 seats, opened in 1998 and still looks current, but its real pull comes from the history it has already stacked up. France’s 1998 FIFA World Cup title, a dramatic 2007 Rugby World Cup and its role as a major site for the 2024 Paris Olympics have all passed through there.
Now the Saints will leave their own mark.
Getting the NFL into that building, though, meant adapting a stadium built mainly for soccer and other big events into something that fits the league’s exacting standards. Jon Barker, the NFL’s global head of major events and international games, said the job always comes with a long list of adjustments.
“It’s always going to have challenges whenever you have an American sport in a European stadium,” said Jon Barker, the NFL’s global head of major events and international games. “There’s going to be things that we have to do.
We have to change the field. We have to change the locker rooms.
We have to change some of our camera platforms. … But we’re in great shape today.
“If you want to play this game tomorrow, let’s go.”
The league has gotten comfortable with that kind of work as its international footprint has grown. France is the ninth non-U.S. country to host an NFL game, part of a global push that started in 2007. Still, every site brings its own problems, and the field usually becomes the biggest one.
That was obvious this season in Brazil, where the Week 3 game between the Dallas Cowboys and Baltimore Ravens drew attention for the playing surface after comments from a local soccer star ripped the conditions before the game. The NFL also shifted a 2018 game out of Mexico City because the field was not up to standard.
Paris, by contrast, drew a more confident read from NFL field director Nick Pappas on Thursday. Even so, the venue needed work. Because Stade de France is usually set up for soccer, the league has had to re-stitch the grass so it better suits NFL players.
“There needs to be stability and traction,” Pappas said.
“There are different attributes that are needed for a soccer-specific field versus an NFL-specific field,” he said. “A lot of that is due to soccer is very much a ball on the ground sport, right?
So the planarity and smoothness of how a ball rolls on the soccer pitch is critical to their gameplay. … Our athletes are typically larger, typically faster, applying more force to the ground.
“Getting that footing is really imperative,” he added.
Beyond the field itself, the league has also had to deal with the weather and with the stadium’s design. Rain in the forecast means extra attention, and the nine-lane athletic track around the field had to be covered.
Inside, the transformation has gone further. The locker rooms were expanded to fit an NFL roster. On the eighth floor, a space that used to serve as hospitality has been turned into coaches' booths, an instant reply area and other operations.
Not everything is permanent. Those booths will come out after the game so the hospitality area can return to normal.
But some of the infrastructure will stay put. The cables and channels installed by the league so coaches and staff can communicate during the game will remain in place.
That makes the Paris stop feel less like a one-off and more like a beginning.
“We’re not just here to play a game and then leave,” Barker said. “This is a long-term investment for us.
This is a very important market for us. We’re opening offices here and our plan is to play many, many games in France.
So we’re looking forward to the first one.”
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