Saquon Is Playing for Equity

Summary

Saquon Barkley calls me, but he’s distracted. In the background, two little voices shout “Bye, friends!” as Barkley wrangles his kids, Jada, 7, and Saquon Jr., 3, into the car. He apologizes, then explains they’re headed to an Old Spice photo shoot tied to his latest endorsement — a Saquon-branded shampoo and conditioner called “Saquon Soar.”It’s a cinematic image: one of the NFL’s biggest stars juggling dad duty and the demands of a sponsorship. But Barkley isn’t content to just cash checks and smile for the camera. He has always treated these deals as building blocks for the empire he’s determined to build before football ends. And he knows it could all end suddenly.From the moment he entered the NFL in 2018, Barkley carried a kind of financial paranoia that most athletes don’t confront until retirement. He parked his entire $31.2 million rookie contract into long-term investments like the S&P 500, vowing to live only off endorsements. In 2021, he went further, backing payments app Strike as his first startup investment and pledging to take all marketing income in Bitcoin through the platform. At the time, Bitcoin’s price was approximately $32,000. Today, it’s hovering around $111,000, turning a $10 million income stream into a $35 million asset.That move rattled more than a few people. “Good old American dollars should be the standard,” superagent Leigh Steinberg warned, cautioning athletes against chasing crypto volatility.Barkley heard the critics, but he doubled down. Sitting on cash, he argued, isn’t enough — not when most athletes earn the bulk of their money in their 20s and face inflation, poor financial literacy, and limited access to tools. “A sad yet common reality is many enter bankruptcy later on,” he wrote on X. “We can do better.”His drive isn’t just financial. Barkley has the career most players dream about, but those closest to him say that his humility is born out of a gnawing sense that it could all slip away.For Barkley, equity is a safeguard —...