PARIS — French residents tuning in Sunday for the country’s first-ever NFL game may know next to nothing about the sport, its rules or its teams when the New Orleans Saints take on the Pittsburgh Steelers at Stade de France.

But odds are, they’ll at least recognize the voice calling the game.

Matthieu Lartot will be the play-by-play man for France Télévisions, a familiar face after years of calling rugby and tennis, two of the country’s biggest sports.

“They’ll see him and say, ‘Oh, this is serious,’” said Samyr Hamoudi, the color commentator for Sunday’s game alongside Lartot.

As the NFL expands its international series into Paris, the league is betting that France’s love of sports will lead the country to connect with American football. But to fall in love with the game, French fans will first have to understand it. That barrier to entry can be steep.

How do you explain a sport as complex as football in a way that's simple enough to compel first-time viewers? France is the NFL’s latest try. Sunday’s game will have three primary French-language broadcasts.

There’s France Télévisions, the state-owned network. There’s beIN Sports, a subscription channel comparable to ESPN. And there’s L’Equipe, which airs its broadcast on delay in prime time.

Three different networks. Three different ways of trying to explain the game. But the NFL hopes the broad reach will bring in a new wave of fans.

“It’s a balance,” said Jeff Lombardi, who leads the NFL’s international media operations for broadcasters. “We don’t want to dumb down the game for the avid fan, but we want to provide enough context so that a new fan can turn it on and not feel like they’re lost.”

Striking a balance

In his 25 years as an NFL analyst, Hamoudi has found that some football phrases just don’t work in French.

Sure, he could translate it directly. But the viewers would have no idea what he’s talking about, he said.

“Drop-backs, that’s something people don’t know, so you say ‘il recule,’ and ‘il recule’ is more like he’s going backward,” Hamoudi said. “You have a pass in the flat, make sure you say it’s in the short zone.”

The networks involved in Sunday’s game are accounting for plenty of first-time viewers. At beIN Sports, play-by-play man Lionel Buton said the network is fully leaning into the spectacle of Sunday’s game with a one-hour pre-game show — filled with guests, sideline access and other components that wouldn’t be possible if they were calling the game remotely. Buton said they’re treating the game as France’s “Super Bowl,” going all out with their coverage.

Because beIN Sports already hosts NFL games, Buton said he doesn’t necessarily expect to call the game differently in terms of play-by-play. But that’s not the case for France Télévisions, where Hamoudi said he plans to remind viewers every quarter of the basics: Four downs to get 10 yards, 10 yards to keep the drive moving, etc.

The NFL also helps its international broadcasts. Lombardi said the league provides short vignettes — football “101s” — that can air between breaks to help educate new viewers. The league also gives producers a live feed of the American call, so that if Kurt Warner makes a smart observation on NFL Network about what’s happening on the field, the producer can then relay that information to their own broadcasters in real time.

BeIn Sports color commentator Marc-Angelo Soumah said that most people in France are aware of American football, particularly because of the Super Bowl. But they’re more likely to know who played the halftime show than who won the game.

That brings a different audience.

“You first expose them to the event,” Soumah said. “And then you expose them to the sports.”

The plan is to be authentic. As a play-by-play man for 30 years, Buton said he wants the broadcast to feel fun. He takes pride in his dynamic with Soumah, as they both love the game and hope their passion comes through.

“I know we have a good chemistry with my partner, which is not the case with Troy Aikman and Joe Buck right now,” Buton said, joking about the ESPN duo’s contract drama.

L’Equipe, meanwhile, faces its own set of unique challenges. Because the network is airing the game, which kicks off at 3:30 p.m. local time, in prime time (9 p.m.), L’Equipe color commentator Anthony Mahoungou said he’ll call Sunday’s result on delay from a studio — hours after he already witnessed the game in person.

“I will have to make sure we keep everything a surprise and be surprised to live the moment with everybody who’s watching on TV,” Mahoungou said.

Hamoudi says he hopes to capture people’s attention by explaining the stakes and comparing the teams in ways they can relate to. The analyst plans to reiterate the Saints’ French connections, while he plans to explain how the Steelers are like Saint-Étienne, a historic soccer team from a blue-collar town.

“The result is important,” Hamoudi said, “but we’re going to sell a show.”

Long time coming

Growing up in the south of France, Buton can still remember the moment he quit playing soccer. He was 14, and his coach subbed him out for not flopping to draw a penalty.

Buton, now 56, found American football soon after that.

“I get to watch the NFL, and it was quite the opposite of that,” said Buton, who went on to play quarterback for the Canonniers de Toulon, a French club that plays American football. “You don’t want to stay down. You don’t want to show pain. Those were things that I loved about the sport then.”

Every die-hard NFL fan in France has their own story of how they’ve come to love the game. Soumah said he was drawn to the 1986 New York Giants, causing him to scour newspapers for any additional info and wake up in the wee hours of the morning to consume any footage he could get.

Soumah, in particular, has been a pioneer for American football in France. After playing in NFL Europe and having an offseason stint with the 2003 Cleveland Browns, Soumah later became the president of the Fédération Française de Football Américain, which oversees all levels of American football in France. He also co-founded the Paris Musketeers, a team in the European Football Alliance.

Hamoudi and Mahoungou have extensive playing experience as well. Hamoudi, a former cornerback, played in NFL Europe from 1999 to 2003. Mahoungou played college football at Purdue, spent the 2018 offseason with the Philadelphia Eagles and has bounced around between Canadian and European leagues since. The 32-year-old wide receiver is also focused on flag football, hoping to represent France in the 2028 Olympics.

So for the NFL to finally have a game in France, well, there’s no wonder they’re excited.

“We were expecting to have it sooner,” Soumah said. “We were pissed off to have Madrid before Paris, because we consider ourselves a bigger market, a bigger audience and a bigger lover of American football. For me as a passionate guy, it’s like, ‘Finally! Finally, this happened.’”

Ideally, the NFL would have liked to be in France sooner. Brett Gosper, the NFL’s head of Europe and Asia-Pacific, said the league waited out the 2024 Paris Olympics because Stade de France, the stadium for Sunday’s game, then needed to undergo renovations to accommodate the needs of an NFL game. But he believes there’s still genuine interest: 70% of tickets to this weekend’s outing have been purchased by the French, he said.

The league will be closely monitoring how the games perform on local television.

Gosper touted that a France Télévisions program about the New Orleans Saints peaked at 3 million viewers — though the executive fairly noted that the show was aired after President Emmanuel Macron’s address about the civil unrest and protests across the country. “It’s an incredible number,” Gosper said, noting the broadcast still averaged 2 million viewers.

The expectations for Sunday’s game are much more modest. Lombardi said the NFL expects France Télévisions broadcast to average around 500,000 viewers, which would be lower than the 900,000 that Germany’s first NFL game drew locally.

In the U.S., the Ravens’ win over the Cowboys in Brazil became the most-watched international game in league history with 24.9 million viewers.

“It is just making sure that we’re growing,” Lombardi said about the league’s plans for France. “And that next year it’s 5%, 10% more, 25% more.”

Speaking over the phone, Buton thought back to the days when he first fell in love with the NFL. He had trouble finding a football in France, so he used to fold 50 socks into a tube shape, so he could teach himself how to throw a spiral.

Now, he’s ready to teach anyone else tuning in for the first time.

“Being able to watch a game in France now,” Buton said, “I just think it’s amazing. It’s like going full circle, you know?”