As a superstar running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, Saquon Barkley has had plenty of opportunities to flex his design muscle. He’s worked on his own shoes and branded apparel, but nothing comes close to his latest project: designing a custom watch with beloved Swiss watchmaker H. Moser & Cie that gave him an even deeper appreciation for timepieces.
“You don’t really get to be too detailed when it comes to designing apparel,” Barkley tells us. “But when it comes to a watch—the little stuff that’s within a watch—it’s just on a whole other level, and you just have a different appreciation of it.” The result of this hyper-focused approach is the new H. Moser Pioneer Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Aventurine Saquon Barkley Edition, a $99,600 watch limited to just 97 pieces.
Barkley first discovered Moser while preparing to attend the Met in 2025. He needed a watch to wear and found his way to the independent Swiss house. It’s been a mad love affair ever since. Designing a watch is “something I’ve always kind of wanted to do,” Barkley says. “When you are living this life and setting goals, I want to do stuff that takes me out of the atmosphere of just being a football player. And there aren’t many NFL athletes that can say they have their own watch. And to do it with such a prestigious brand like H. Moser made it ten times better.”
The Pioneer is Barkley’s first horological baby, and a classic Moser: it blurs the line between a sport and dress watch and packs specs that are catnip for the deepest nerds. The most critical element for Barkley was the skeletonized movement—“being able to see inside was super important,” he says. The single element that prevents you from looking inside the watch is the subdial made of aventurine, a stone that looks like the night sky.
The watch is a tribute to Barkley in more ways than one. There are the obvious touches like the Super-LumiNova-filled numerals 2 and 6, which glow a different color from the rest of the indices in honor of Barkley’s jersey number. But this wouldn’t be a terribly appropriate watch for someone like Barkley—renowned for his explosive speed and signature backward hurdles—if it couldn’t take some physical abuse. The Pioneer checks those boxes with 120m of water resistance and is hardy enough to be worn every day, in any situation.
Designing the new Barkley edition completely changed how the running back thinks about his timepieces. “Before, it was like, ‘How does the watch look? What’s the price on the watch?’ That was how you set the value of a great watch, and thought about what I want to put on when going out for dinner or an event,” Barkley says. But designing a $99,600 luxury timepiece changed everything. The running back brought up hairsprings, a tiny piece of coiled metal that is essential to keeping time, more than once in our interview. “I understand the process behind making a really good watch,” Barkley says, “so my appreciation of it is different.”
