SAINT-DENIS, France — The National Football League will play its first regular-season game in France on Sunday, at the Stade de France, two stops from the heart of a city whose streets have spent two weeks telling the government what it thinks of the government, and the league has announced, in the firm tone of a man adjusting his tie, that the tailgate will be slightly smaller than advertised.
The league confirmed this week that the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Orleans Saints will play October 25 as scheduled, that security at and around the stadium will be heightened, and that pregame festivities have been toned down. A league statement has been circulating since last week and remains, like the game itself, unimpressed by events: preparations, it says, “continue as scheduled.” Four words have never worked harder.
The word doing the actual labor is “toned.” The tailgate will occur, but at reduced volume, in the way a funeral allows laughing. The league has never before exported its parking-lot religion — the folding chairs, the canopies, the man with the flat-top grill who is the actual founder of the franchise — and the first European congregation has been advised to worship quietly.
Gerald Fenton of Baton Rouge, who flew to Paris for this game with a grill he described as “my father’s, which was his father’s, which was probably somebody’s courtship,” says he understands the mood but not the fuss. “There’s a protest six kilometers away, there’s a third-and-long here, and I have been told the league wants us contained,” he said, arranging charcoal with the calm of a man who has tailgated through hurricanes. “Contained is fine. We’ve been contained our whole lives. That’s what a stadium is.”
The local authorities, for their part, have expressed enthusiasm and inspections. A prefecture official overseeing stadium access, who spoke on condition his name be protected from his own childhood, confirmed that security around the match will be substantial and that items judged dangerous will be refused at the gate. When asked specifically about baguettes, the official paused with the weight of a national question and said the position was evolving. French media have since reported at length on the baguette position. Everyone is handling it very seriously, which is the French way of handling absurdity, and the league has adopted it.
The fixture itself is now the second-oldest argument in Saint-Denis: the Steelers and Saints, 5-1 and 4-2, arriving into a suburb that has become this month’s most-watched crowd noise. Ticket sales for the game, unusually, are being discussed in the same breath as the traffic to the game, and the league, which has spent a decade selling the idea that an American football game is a portable holiday, is learning that holidays travel with the weather.
Security will be heightened. The festivities will be toned. The game, per the statement, will be scheduled, which is the word the league uses the way other institutions use “eternal.”
The grill, Fenton confirmed before walking toward the gate, was inspected for two full minutes. It passed. It is considered food.