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There is always a price for loyalty.
For Charles Barkley, apparently it’s nine figures.
Speaking with Dan Le Batard on his radio show Tuesday, the Hall of Fame basketball player and analyst for TNT said his decision to stick with his longtime employer didn’t come cheap.
“A minimum of $100 million,” Barkley said when asked about how much he left on the table. “A minimum.”
In 2022, Barkley signed a 10-year, $210 million contract extension to keep him at TNT. After this year he will still have eight years left on that contract, but it will also likely be Turner’s final year of the NBA rights barring a miracle in the company’s lawsuit against the league after NBC and Amazon got in on the league’s new media-rights deal.
With the contractual ability to opt out if TNT lost NBA rights, Barkley listened to the likes of ESPN and Amazon, he told Dan Patrick last month. That came on the heels of Barkley claiming earlier this summer that he would be retiring after the 2024–2025 season.
“I’ve talked to all the other networks … but I ain’t going nowhere, other than TNT,” Barkely said then. “But, I have made the decision myself. No matter what happens, next year is going to be my last year on television.”
And then last week, he reversed course saying he’s sticking with TNT, regardless of NBA rights.
“The number-one thing for me is that my people at Turner get to keep their jobs another year,” Barkley told Le Batard.
Barkley didn’t say how he arrived at the $100 million number, but some back-of-napkin math is simple. He earns about $21 million a year from TNT; the media giants with NBA rights clearly offered him more. They might continue to do so after this year, despite Barkley’s claims of being with TNT for years to come and TNT’s claim they may want to redevelop Inside the NBA as a general sports show.
Another way of interpreting Barkley’s comments: Instead of bragging about his generosity, the master of negotiating through the media is simply saying that $100 million isn’t enough. It shouldn’t take much more than that, though. In 2022, when he was flirting with leaving TNT for LIV Golf, he said he’d “kill a relative” for $200 million.
