Adrian Peterson’s French Touchdown: How an NFL Pariah Became Europe’s Latest Import Scandal
Adrian Peterson and the Global Trade in Disposable Heroes
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic
PARIS—Because nothing says “universal human values” quite like a 38-year-old American running back still hawking his wares on the open market, Adrian Peterson has once again become an unlikely diplomatic incident. The NFL’s erstwhile MVP—whose career highlight reel now doubles as a Rorschach test for how much violence you’re willing to forgive in exchange for touchdowns—signed last week with the Bordeaux Gaulois of France’s embryonic Elite One Championship. Somewhere in a climate-controlled office in Geneva, a junior attaché is quietly updating the International Red Cross database on collateral damage.
Let’s be clear: Peterson is not here to spread the gospel of American football so much as to collect a paycheck in euros while his own country debates whether his highlight reels should come with a trigger warning. France, a nation that still pretends to be scandalized when its farmers dump manure on government buildings, has decided that importing an athlete once indicted for child abuse is simply “cultural exchange.” If that strikes you as the same logic used to sell cluster bombs as “agricultural reform,” congratulations—you’ve been paying attention.
The Bordeaux front office, naturally, insists this is about “growing the game.” Translation: they’d like to sell a few jerseys before the entire league folds like a cheap chaise longue. The French sports daily L’Équipe greeted the news with the sort of breathless prose normally reserved for wine harvests, calling Peterson “le colosse du Minnesota” and glossing over that pesky 2014 switch incident as a “malentendu familial.” Somewhere in Lagos, a scammer just copied that phrasing into his next email.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, ESPN’s talking heads performed the ritual kabuki of pretending to be shocked—shocked!—that a man with 3,230 career carries and a civil judgment for whipping his four-year-old son could still find employment. This is the same network that once devoted a 12-minute segment to ranking the cutest NFL quarterbacks’ dogs, so moral consistency isn’t exactly its brand. The moral outrage cycle lasted exactly 36 hours, roughly the same shelf life as a TikTok filter.
Across Asia, where the NFL has been staging preseason games in Tokyo and Seoul to crack the last great untapped market for shoulder pads, executives watched the Peterson saga with the cold fascination of botanists observing a new mold. “If the French can monetize nostalgia for bruised childhoods,” one Shanghai-based league rep mused over $18 cocktails, “imagine what we could do with a repentant sumo wrestler.” The comment was off the record, naturally; nothing kills a branding opportunity faster than sincerity.
In Africa, the continent Peterson once visited on offseason charity tours, local federations greeted the Bordeaux deal with a collective shrug. When you’ve watched European football clubs pluck 14-year-olds from dusty academies like ripe mangoes, the arrival of a weathered American running back barely registers. One Senegalese coach told me, between drags on a hand-rolled cigarette, “At least Monsieur Peterson is honest about what he’s selling.” Honesty, it turns out, is the rarest performance-enhancing drug of all.
The broader significance, if you insist on finding one, is that the global sports economy has perfected the art of laundering reputations along with money. Peterson’s jersey will hang in a boutique on Rue Sainte-Catherine, right between limited-edition sneakers stitched by underpaid hands in Vietnam and artisanal bottled water sourced from a glacier that no longer exists. Consumers will debate his yards-per-carry average while sipping fair-trade espresso, blissfully unaware that the entire transaction is underwritten by the same moral credit default swaps that keep FIFA executives in Rolexes.
And so the caravan moves on. Next week Bordeaux hosts the Barcelona Dracs, whose star safety once pled no contest to domestic violence in three countries and still sells yogurt in commercials. Tickets are €22, children under 12 half-price—because nothing says family entertainment like a continent that learned imperialism from us and now returns the favor, one memorabilia sale at a time.
By the time Peterson retires for good—probably after a ceremonial stint in the short-lived Saudi Pro League—there will be a vineyard named after him. The vintage will be bold, tannic, and just a little hard to swallow. Much like the man himself.
