Mousekingdom Blog

The Walt Disney Company is apparently ready to shell out the small matter of $10million to employ one person for the next four years. The person in question is American Football star Tiki Barber, currently playing for the New York Giants in the National Football League, and Disney want him to be the star turn on their sports programmes in the US.

Barber announced in mid-season he was quitting the sport at the end of the current campaign (which, for the Giants, might be Sunday night, Jan 7, when the team face a play-off game in Philadelphia), with the fairly obvious intention of getting a TV job. It made sense for him as he has always been media-orientated, but nothing seemed set in stone last week.

Now the New York Post is reporting a deal is already done and dusted, and the size of the contract is an absolute stunner – a cool $2.25m a year.

Disney own both the ESPN sports network and ABC TV, and the feeling is Barber will be a star turn on both channels. But $10m for a talking head? The contract is only slightly less than he was earning to actually play the game! How can anyone be worth that much money to provide expert opinion about sport??

You certainly can’t blame Barber for taking the money (although I’d have done it for half that!), and he is an intelligent, articulate guy who will probably add a lot to ESPN’s coverage. You can’t blame him for wanting to take the secure option of a studio seat rather than the gridiron field, where he’s been pounded by guys twice his size for the last 10 years.

But surely the Disney TV people have taken temporary leave of their senses if this deal is anywhere near that $10m figure? When Disney’s US theme park cast members are working long hours for as little as $7 an hour (under $4 an hour in tipped positions), it sounds an even more outrageous figure.

You could almost understand it if they were spending that much to lure iconic commentator John Madden back into the company ranks from NBC, but to be spending millions of dollars on a completely unproven broadcasting ‘talent’ is truly astonishing.

Among all the predictions for Disney in 2007, I certainly didn’t see anything that suggested the TV executives were going to be throwing money away. But, right now, that is how it looks from here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Disney in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.