Why American soccer needs semi-pro leagues I Real Central New Jersey's Ira Jersey on founding a club
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TSS
4.8 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Our longtime friend Ira Jersey is here for a bonus episode to discuss his club, Real Central New Jersey. Founded in early 2020 (what a fun time), RCNJ sought to bridge the divide between soccer in North Jersey and soccer in South Jersey. But what has the club learned along the way? How has it grown and stayed increasingly relevant in its local community? And, right off the bat, is it "ray-al" or "real?" Plus, the potential impact of promotion and relegation, the barriers to growth for small clubs, and much much more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a special bonus episode of The Total Soccer Show. |
| 0:23.6 | My name is Taylor Rockwell, and today we're spotlighting a club with connections near and dear to The Total Soccer Show Heart. |
| 0:29.4 | It's Rayall Center, New Jersey. |
| 0:31.0 | I'm not even sure I got the Real right. |
| 0:32.4 | Of that one, we'll find out here with me to talk about a whole bunch of different things. |
| 0:35.9 | Is the club's founder and general manager? |
| 0:37.7 | It's Ira Jersey. |
| 0:38.5 | Hello, Ira. |
| 0:39.5 | Hello, Taylor Rockwell. |
| 0:41.3 | It is real Central New Jersey because Central Jersey is a real place. |
| 0:45.8 | I'm happy to say that our name was one of our interns back in 2020 in the middle of COVID |
| 0:52.7 | when we started the club came up with the |
| 0:55.4 | idea for the name. And at the time, Central Jersey was a hotly debated, what was a hotly |
| 1:01.3 | debated topic, whether or not we existed. We always knew we did. So we're real Central, |
| 1:05.9 | New Jersey. An intern came up with the name? What was that process like? Well, so we founded the club in |
| 1:12.6 | March of 2020, exactly the perfect time to be founding an entertainment and sports business. |
| 1:19.7 | Wow. Yeah. And so we were we were gearing up because we had always planned on not playing our |
| 1:26.0 | first season until 2021. |
| 1:28.0 | So in 2020, we were using that as our ramp up year. |
| 1:30.7 | So we had, we hired some interns and one of our interns, Max, shout out to Max. |
| 1:36.4 | He is a listener to TSS. |
| 1:39.1 | He, so he was, he was one of our marketing interns along with Jeremy Ryan, who's one of our founding partners as well and our chief marketing officer. |
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