Burna Boy will headline the halftime show at the NFL's first-ever regular-season game in France, taking the stage October 25 at Paris' Stade de France during the matchup between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Orleans Saints. According to DancehallMag, kickoff is set for 2:30 p.m. local time, or 9:30 a.m. EDT for American viewers.
The booking is a homecoming. In April 2025, Burna Boy became the first African artist to headline a solo concert at Stade de France, selling all 80,000 tickets. "Paris gave me one of the biggest nights of my career, and to walk back into Stade de France for a moment like this means everything," he said. "The NFL is bringing something to France that has never happened here before, and I get to stand in the middle of it representing African music."
As Digital Music News reports, the Paris performance is one of a record seven halftime shows staged across the 2026 NFL International Games, spanning seven countries and four continents. Other announced performers include the Jonas Brothers in Melbourne, Pedro Sampaio and Ricky Martin in Rio de Janeiro, Ayra Starr in London, Cage The Elephant in Munich and The Warning in Mexico City.
Tim Tubito, the NFL's senior director of global game presentation, said Burna Boy's history with Paris and global reach made him the obvious choice for the league's French debut: "There is no artist better suited to it than Burna Boy."
The Paris show is part of the NFL's biggest international entertainment push ever. As Digital Music News reports, the league will stage a record seven halftime shows across the 2026 International Games, its most international season to date. Burna Boy's credentials for the slot are unmatched: 13 Grammy nominations, the first African artist to perform on the main Grammy telecast, and that historic 80,000-ticket Stade de France sellout in April 2025. For a league trying to win over a French audience raised on a different kind of football, booking an artist who already packed the building on his own name is, as DancehallMag puts it, about as safe a bet as the NFL could make.
Photo: Nuță Lucian / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)