Burna Boy will headline the halftime show at the NFL’s first regular-season game in France, returning to Stade de France on October 25th after making history at the venue last year.
The Nigerian artist will perform during the Pittsburgh Steelers-New Orleans Saints game at the 80,000-capacity stadium in Saint-Denis. Kickoff is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. local time, with the halftime performance airing live in France on France Télévisions and beIN Sports.
The NFL announced the booking September 17th as part of a record seven halftime shows attached to its 2026 International Games. Those performances span seven countries and four continents, making music a much more deliberate part of the league’s overseas schedule.
Paris already occupies an important place in Burna Boy’s touring history. On April 18th, 2025, he became the first African artist to headline Stade de France, giving the NFL a halftime act who has already demonstrated that his own audience can fill the building.
Stade de France Is Familiar Ground
Burna Boy’s previous night at Stade de France changes the context of the NFL booking.
His April 2025 concert brought a Nigerian headliner to one of Europe’s largest live-music stages after years of Afrobeats moving steadily from clubs and festival bills into arenas and stadiums. The show was part of a touring career that had already taken Burna Boy to venues including London Stadium and New York’s Citi Field.
Returning for the NFL gives that achievement a different frame. Burna Boy is not being introduced to a French stadium audience as an artist whose international appeal still needs to be tested. He has already headlined the same venue under his own name.
“Paris gave me one of the biggest nights of my career,” Burna Boy said in the NFL’s announcement, describing the chance to return to Stade de France as particularly meaningful.
He also framed the performance as an opportunity to represent African music while the league brings its first regular-season game to France.
The venue history appears to have mattered in the selection. Tim Tubito, the NFL’s senior director of global game presentation, music and entertainment, specifically pointed to Burna Boy’s previous Stade de France show and African music’s prominence in Paris.
Le Parisien notes that Burna Boy had already proved his drawing power in Saint-Denis before the NFL announced its own arrival.
Afro-Fusion Fits a Global Halftime Stage
A short stadium performance asks something very different of Burna Boy’s catalog than a full headline concert.
His music has spent years moving between Afrobeats, dancehall, reggae, hip-hop, R&B and Nigerian pop, but some of his biggest records are built around musical ideas that register almost immediately.
“Last Last” is the clearest example. The 2022 single turns a sample of Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough” into the foundation for one of Burna Boy’s biggest crossover records, pairing a familiar melodic fragment with Nigerian percussion, a direct vocal hook and lyrics that mix heartbreak with swagger.
The song became a global hit without flattening Burna Boy’s sound into conventional American pop. “Ye,” “On the Low” and “Anybody” similarly helped establish the rhythmic and vocal identity that carried his music into international festivals and increasingly large headline venues.
Twice as Tall expanded his profile further in 2020, while Love, Damini pushed “Last Last” into another level of crossover visibility. His more recent No Sign of Weakness continued placing African rhythmic foundations beside collaborators and sounds drawn from outside the continent.
Halftime leaves little room for the pacing of a normal concert. Songs need to establish themselves quickly, transitions have to move fast and the performance has to work simultaneously for a stadium and a television audience that may know only part of the catalog.
Burna Boy has plenty of material built for that scale, but the NFL has not announced a set list, performance length or guest artists. Anything more specific about what he will play would be speculation.
The NFL Is Booking Seven Halftime Shows
Paris is one piece of a much larger music strategy.
The NFL is staging seven halftime shows across its 2026 International Games, the most it has presented during a single international season. Rather than taking one entertainment package around the world, the league is pairing different artists with individual markets.
- Melbourne: Jonas Brothers
- Rio de Janeiro: Ricky Martin and Pedro Sampaio
- London: Ayra Starr
- Paris: Burna Boy
- Munich: Cage The Elephant
- Mexico City: The Warning
The international lineup stretches across four continents and accompanies the league’s largest overseas season to date.
Several bookings have an obvious connection to their host markets. Brazilian artist Pedro Sampaio joins Ricky Martin at Maracanã, Mexican rock trio The Warning gets the Mexico City game, while Burna Boy returns to a Paris venue where he has already headlined.
Others reflect the increasingly international nature of music audiences rather than simple nationality matching. Ayra Starr’s London appearance and Burna Boy’s Paris booking put African pop at the center of two separate European games within the same month.
Burna Boy and Ayra Starr Give Afrobeats Two Stages
Ayra Starr will take the NFL’s London halftime stage two weeks before Burna Boy arrives in Paris.
She is scheduled to perform October 11th when the Philadelphia Eagles face the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Like Burna Boy, Starr will receive a live halftime broadcast in the host country rather than appearing only for fans inside the venue.
The NFL describes Starr as one of the defining voices of a younger generation of African pop, citing more than seven billion global streams and a rapidly expanding international live profile.
Putting Starr in London and Burna Boy in Paris gives African music two distinct positions within the same international series rather than treating Afrobeats as a one-night cultural addition.
The pair also represents different stages of the music’s global expansion.
Burna Boy spent much of the late 2010s helping push Nigerian pop toward mainstream festival, arena and awards recognition outside Africa. By the time Starr’s “Rush” traveled internationally, streaming, social media and global touring had already created a wider infrastructure for African artists to reach listeners without first being absorbed into an American or European pop format.
London and Paris make logical stages for that contrast. Both cities have substantial African and diasporic audiences as well as established club, radio and live-music ecosystems where Nigerian and other African artists have built audiences well beyond specialist scenes.
France Gets the Full Halftime Show Live
The broadcast plan gives Burna Boy’s performance substantially more reach than an in-stadium entertainment slot.
France Télévisions will carry the halftime show live free-to-air, while beIN Sports will also broadcast the game and performance. L’Équipe is scheduled to show the game later that evening.
The league confirms that viewers in France will receive the full halftime performance rather than a shortened highlight package.
That matters because Pittsburgh and New Orleans are entering a market where the NFL has never staged a regular-season game. Burna Boy provides another reason for viewers with little attachment to either team to encounter the broadcast.
Stade de France itself adds scale. The national stadium has hosted major football and rugby matches alongside concerts by some of the world’s largest touring artists, giving the NFL an established entertainment venue rather than a temporary overseas setting.
For Burna Boy, television also changes the audience. His 2025 headline concert proved that he could sell the building. The October 25th appearance puts him in front of a broader national broadcast audience attached to an event that has never happened in France before.
The NFL Is Building Local Music Into Expansion
Music has become increasingly visible in the NFL’s international strategy as the league moves into new countries.
The 2026 lineup suggests the league is not treating halftime as interchangeable entertainment. Pedro Sampaio gives Rio a major Brazilian presence, The Warning connects Mexico City with contemporary Mexican rock, and Burna Boy’s existing history at Stade de France gives Paris an artist with a demonstrated relationship to the market.
Tubito said African music sits “right at the heart” of what Paris listens to, language included in the NFL’s September 17th announcement. That is the league’s characterization of the market, but the booking also comes with a concrete piece of evidence: Burna Boy has already filled its largest stadium.
The same strategy gives international games an identity beyond the teams on the field. Local or regionally relevant artists can connect a visiting American sports league with audiences that may already know the music long before they know the matchup.
No set length, songs or guest performers have been announced for Burna Boy’s October 25th appearance.
What is confirmed already gives the Paris game a distinctive musical identity. France’s first regular-season NFL game will hand its halftime stage to the first African artist who ever headlined Stade de France.