Sports / NFL — The Steelers Saints Paris game made history twice on Sunday: it was the NFL’s first regular-season game on French soil, and in the second quarter Aaron Rodgers threw the 540th touchdown pass of his career, passing Peyton Manning for third place on the all-time list, as Pittsburgh beat New Orleans 16-10 at the Stade de France.

Aaron Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who threw his 540th career touchdown pass in the Steelers Saints Paris game
Aaron Rodgers, whose second-quarter touchdown pass in Paris was the 540th of his career, moving him past Peyton Manning into third place all time. Photo: Cramerwiki via Wikimedia Commons (CC0), file photo.

PARIS — The NFL came to France for the first time on Sunday, and it brought a milestone with it. The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the New Orleans Saints 16-10 at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, in a Week 7 game that was officially a Saints home fixture but sounded, for long stretches, like a Pittsburgh one — the crowd leaned heavily toward the Steelers, according to NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk. The win was Pittsburgh’s third in a row and lifted the Steelers to 5-2. New Orleans fell to 2-5.

The moment the afternoon will be remembered for arrived with 6:51 left in the second quarter. Two plays after Rodgers launched a 51-yard completion to DK Metcalf — a throw that, per Steelers Now, was the 95th completion of 50 or more yards in Rodgers’ career, the most by any quarterback in NFL history — he floated a four-yard fade to tight end Darnell Washington in the end zone. It was the only touchdown Pittsburgh scored all day, and it was the 540th touchdown pass of Rodgers’ regular-season career: one more than Peyton Manning’s 539, good for sole possession of third place all time, behind only Drew Brees (571) and Tom Brady (649). Rodgers has now thrown the first NFL touchdown pass in two countries — he also threw the league’s first score in Ireland, when the Steelers played in Dublin last season.

How the game was won

This was a field-goal game dressed as a showcase. Chris Boswell opened the scoring with a 28-yard field goal on Pittsburgh’s first drive, after Jaylen Warren announced himself with a 29-yard run on the second play from scrimmage. Daniel Carlson answered from 38 yards early in the second quarter to tie it 3-3, on a drive kept alive when an expedited review ruled Tyler Shough down before a T.J. Watt strip-sack could become a turnover. Then came the Rodgers-Washington touchdown and the game’s one real exchange of blows: Shough, playing with broken bones in his left, non-throwing hand, drove New Orleans 75 yards and hit Devaughn Vele for a one-yard touchdown on fourth down with 1:48 left in the half to tie it 10-10.

Pittsburgh still took a lead into the locker room, in the game’s most chaotic sequence: sacked on third down with no timeouts left and the clock running out, Rodgers watched his field-goal unit sprint onto the field, and Boswell drilled a 47-yarder as time expired for 13-10. The second half belonged to the defenses, and to one play. New Orleans opened the third quarter by marching into the red zone, only for linebacker Payton Wilson to intercept Shough at the Pittsburgh 10-yard line. Boswell converted the turnover into a 39-yard field goal late in the third quarter — 16-10 — and that was the end of the scoring. Carlson missed a 52-yard field goal in the fourth quarter, Patrick Queen’s sack forced a late punt, and when the Saints were flagged for offside on a late Pittsburgh field-goal attempt, the penalty handed the Steelers a first down and the chance to kneel out the clock.

Jaylen Warren of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who rushed for 101 yards in the Steelers Saints Paris game
Jaylen Warren carried Pittsburgh’s offense on the ground in Paris: 101 rushing yards on 18 carries, plus 36 receiving yards. Photo: Cramerwiki via Wikimedia Commons (CC0), file photo.

Why this matters

Start with the milestone, because milestones at this altitude are not really about one afternoon. Rodgers, at 42 and in what is expected to be his final season, is not chasing Brady — 649 is out of reach, and Brees’s 571 almost certainly is too. What Sunday did was settle the argument about the step below them. Manning held third place for a decade as the standard of the modern volume passer; Rodgers has now passed him while also owning the best touchdown-to-interception ratio the position has ever seen. Doing it on a four-yard fade, in a foreign stadium, in a game his team won with defense and field goals, is a fittingly Rodgers way to get there: the record book will remember the number, not the aesthetics.

The bigger story is the venue. The NFL has spent two decades exporting regular-season games — London since 2007, then Mexico City, Munich, Frankfurt, São Paulo, Dublin and Madrid — and Paris was the largest untapped football market in Western Europe. The Stade de France, built for the 1998 World Cup final, gave the league a ready-made stage, and the league gave France a designated home team with genuine cultural resonance: New Orleans, the most French city in American professional sports, down to the fleur-de-lis on its helmets. A largely pro-Steelers crowd is not a failure of that concept; it is how these games work. The traveling fan bases of legacy franchises are the product the NFL is selling to new markets, and Pittsburgh’s is among the most portable in the league.

What the numbers actually imply

The box score tells a stranger story than the scoreline. Shough out-passed Rodgers — 30 of 38 for 278 yards against Rodgers’ 19 of 30 for 212 — and New Orleans moved the ball between the 20s all afternoon. What the Saints could not do was run: 18 rushing yards as a team, with Alvin Kamara held to five yards on six carries. A one-dimensional offense throwing against a defense that knows what is coming produces exactly the red-zone profile New Orleans posted: one touchdown in four trips deep into Pittsburgh territory, an interception at the 10, and a missed 52-yarder. Pittsburgh’s offense was hardly prolific — one touchdown on the day — but Warren’s 101 rushing yards let the Steelers control the game’s shape, and their defense, as it did in the overtime win over Tampa Bay, closed the door in the fourth quarter.

For the standings, the win keeps Pittsburgh on top of an AFC North that is being reshaped weekly — Baltimore played Sunday without Lamar Jackson, whose absence we covered in Lamar Jackson ruled out against the Bengals. For New Orleans, 2-5 with a rookie quarterback playing through broken bones in his hand is a season tilting toward development rather than contention — though Shough’s 278 yards, in pain, on a foreign stage, will count as development of the most valuable kind.

The Stade de France in Saint-Denis, venue of the Steelers Saints Paris game, the NFL's first regular-season game in France
The Stade de France in Saint-Denis, which hosted the NFL’s first regular-season game in France on Sunday. Photo: Chabe01 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), file photo from February 2024.

What happens next

The Steelers fly home 5-2 with a three-game winning streak and a quarterback adding a line to his Hall of Fame plaque roughly once a month; their season now turns on whether an offense that managed one touchdown in Paris can hold up against the AFC’s best. The Saints fly home 2-5, but with evidence their rookie quarterback belongs. And the NFL leaves Paris with the answer it came for: a famous stadium, a loud crowd and a historic stat line is the exact footage the league uses to justify the next foreign market. France, on Sunday’s evidence, will not be a one-off.

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