While I was busy yesterday complaining that the press continues to give Governor Phil Murphy a free pass for not paying professional soccer players and team staff the equivalent of $15 an hour the mainstream press was beating the governor up for wanting a soccer stadium in the woods. You can read that mess here, here, here and here.
But Murphy loves trees so after all that news his soccer team, Sky Blue FC, quickly decided against chopping down trees. The team told NJ.com:
"Due to environmental concerns that have been brought to our attention, Sky Blue FC is withdrawing our support for the Trophy Park project application," Tony Novo, the team's general manager, said in a statement late Thursday night.
Here at The Bob & Steve Show we have been critical of Murphy and the way he treats players and staff at his soccer team. NJ.com in their piece pointed out that “Murphy -- who co-owns the team with Steven Temares, the CEO of Bed, Bath & Beyond -- promised in July the ‘unacceptable’ conditions would be fixed.”
Well…it appears those “unacceptable” conditions haven’t been fixed. Just yesterday, the sports blog Once a Metro, published a piece, “Sky Blue FC’s own supporters group is in open revolt against them.” In that piece Once a Metro is clear:
Since Sky Blue’s original statement in July responding to the original reports, and an end-season interview with Howard Megdal at The Athletic, where Novo called the player complaints “noise,” Sky Blue hasn’t officially addressed the issue, nor have they responded to Cloud 9’s statements on social media, externally or internally.
Cloud 9 is “the official supporters group of Sky Blue FC,” Murphy’s soccer team. According to the Once a Metro piece, members of Cloud 9 were quite clear that ownership hasn’t made anything better:
All three said it was a general collective agreement to speak out against Novo and team ownership and express their anger about the players’ conditions - no one mentioned player trades or Holly’s departure among their list of grievances. “I was pretty pissed,” said Morales-Tong of learning about those player conditions. “We can only say so much to the staff. We can only say so much in the emails. It was time that it got out there. We needed everyone to know.”
“If we thought [ownership] were committed to making things better, I think we wouldn’t be going on social media all the time,” said Kane, “But so far the only tangible thing we’ve seen is a trailer with some showers in it that should be an embarrassment. So when we realized that ownership wasn’t making things better, we certainly want to be putting some pressure on them and also putting pressure on U.S. Soccer, on NWSL to do something about this.”
“To be clear, it’s directed at management and ownership,” said Muller. “There are good people in Sky Blue front office that are trying to do good.”
So, it appears Murphy hasn’t even attempted to keep the promise he made to New Jersey’s press. Have they called him out for that? Nope!
And, still those in the press covering Murphy continue to let him off the hook on his $15 an hour hypocrisy.
The Bob & Steve Show and others have pointed out that prior to the 2018 season it was mathematically impossible for Murphy to not pay at least some soccer players less than $15 per hour and that his team tried to pay a professional with a master’s degree nothing, not a penny, and then was forced to pay the employee $15,000 for six months.
The whole point of this post is simple: news outlets covering Murphy were quick to jump all over the fact he wanted to chop down a bunch of trees, but still do not care that he is a total hypocrite on the $15 an hour issue.
It would be nice if just one reporter would ask the governor how he could pay soccer players and staff less than $15 per hour and campaign for governor on the premise that everyone deserves to be paid more than he was paying.
I have a list of questions if anyone in the press needs them.
