Paris moved its biggest football match over the unrest. The NFL game on Sunday is still on

The banners are already up at the Stade de France, the Steelers on one side, the Saints on the other, wrapped around a stadium waiting for the biggest American football game France has ever hosted. A few miles south of those banners, Paris shopkeepers spent the week boarding up their windows. Both of those things are true at once, and that tension is the story of this weekend: on Sunday, the Pittsburgh Steelers play the New Orleans Saints in Saint-Denis, the first NFL regular-season game ever held in France, kickoff at 2:30 in the afternoon local time, and the league insists it was never in doubt.

The NFL said so plainly on Tuesday. The game goes ahead with heightened security, the league's events chief Peter O'Reilly told reporters, with NFL staff on the ground for ten days by then and moving or postponing the fixture, in his account, never close. Aaron Rodgers, the Steelers quarterback, said he trusted the league would have cancelled if it were unsafe, and the Saints have said much the same. Pittsburgh arrive at 4-2, New Orleans at 2-4, and for both teams this is a showcase years in the making, the centrepiece of the NFL's push to turn its European dates from novelties into fixtures.

Why the question had to be asked at all sits in the week Paris has just had. What began as student protests over overcrowded schools, teacher shortages and the cost of living has widened into an anti-government movement that has put more than half a million people on the streets. Last Saturday it tipped over: some 3,000 stores looted by official counts, 2,700 arrests, 855 of them in the Paris region, a town hall torched and more than a thousand rental bikes destroyed, with curfews imposed in several cities. Fresh protests are expected again this Saturday, and the authorities have answered with scale. Around 70,000 police and gendarmes deploy nationwide, a fifth more officers in Paris than last Saturday, soldiers guard the sensitive sites, and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has promised to be, in his words, absolutely uncompromising. Only a union demonstration is authorised in the capital on Saturday, other rallies have been rejected, and the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Grand Palais are among the landmarks closing their doors for the day.

Look at the map and the league's calm starts to make sense. The flashpoints sit in central and eastern Paris: Place de la Bastille, where marches are expected to begin, Place de la République and the Rue de Rivoli, where the looting and clashes came last weekend, and Place de Clichy, where riot police held the line. The stadium sits outside all of that, in Saint-Denis, roughly 10 kilometres north of Bastille, a separate town that can be ringed and locked down on its own. The cancellations around the game underline the point rather than undermine it. The Steelers called off their own Steelers House fan event at a bar in Bastille, calling it a precaution, and the police prefecture ordered Paris Saint-Germain's match against Lyon, set for Sunday night, moved to Monday, with Toulouse against Troyes shifted too. Soccer bent. The NFL game is the one fixture nobody has touched, even as the league's NFL Experience fan festival runs through the weekend on the Champ-de-Mars and the US embassy tells Americans in Paris to avoid crowds and protest areas. The stadium itself is public transport only on Sunday, with strict bag rules and no parking.

Our call is that the stadium will be the safest place in Paris this weekend, wrapped in one of the largest security operations French sport has ever mounted, and that the risk was never really inside it. The risk is Saturday in the centre, and the journey in on Sunday morning. The deeper bet underneath is the league's: the NFL chose to hold its ground in a way French soccer, on police orders, could not, and if Sunday passes without incident that contrast becomes part of the pitch the league takes to every European capital it courts next. A clean weekend in Saint-Denis, with a full house a short train ride from a boarded up city centre, would say more about the NFL's standing in Europe than any attendance figure could. Watch Saturday first. If the centre holds on Saturday night, Sunday was never really in question.