Stade Pershing
Paris (Vincennes), Île-de-France, France
Stade Pershing, Paris (Vincennes), France — opened 1919, 3 rugby league games hosted, home of none — a general athletics/football ground, not a rugby league club's home.
Ground facts
| Opened | 1919 (Built in roughly three months and inaugurated 22 June 1919 on Bois de Vincennes land ceded for that year's Inter-Allied Games; named for General John J. Pershing from the outset.) |
| Home club | none — a general athletics/football ground, not a rugby league club's home |
| Closed | 1960 (Wikipedia); the original stands were demolished in the 1960s per a French rugby league history site, so the exact closure/demolition year is approximate |
| Site today | an amateur sports facility, including baseball and softball pitches, on the original Bois de Vincennes site |
| Games hosted (rugby league, on record) | 3 |
| Top recorded crowd | 5,000 |
| Capacity | approximately 29,000 at its height |
| Years used | 1933–1970 |
| Location | Paris (Vincennes), Île-de-France |
Name history
Rugby league history
A large multi-sport stadium in the Bois de Vincennes, built for the 1919 Inter-Allied Games and later used for football (including Coupe de France finals) and the 1924 Olympics. Its rugby league significance is outsized relative to its brief use: on 31 December 1933, an Australian touring side beat England 63-13 in the first rugby league match ever played in France, an exhibition that — despite poor weather — filled the ground and is widely credited with inspiring Jean Galia to found France's first rugby league club, Les Pionniers, in March 1934. Data quality note: Rugby League Project's own venue page for Stade Pershing carries almost no narrative detail, and data/venues.py records three games there spanning 1933-1970 in total, of which only the 1933 match could be independently corroborated via Wikipedia and French-language sources — the other two recorded games were not individually identified.
Sources
Data last verified: 11 August 2026.
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