On Soccer:The front pages in the New York papers have devoted a good deal of space to the US Senate's latest attempts to address the issue of "illegals" in the country, while the sports pages have been utterly dominated by baseball's "subway series", two wins out of three for the Mets confirming the widely held view that the season is already a lost cause for the Yankees.

Look hard enough and you'll find the more important football results from Europe, a few paragraphs on the Red Bulls' (formerly the Metrostars) MLS win at the weekend and even the briefest of outlines of events at Wembley on Saturday. But try as you might, you'll not be able to read a word about tomorrow night's game between Ireland and Ecuador at Giants Stadium.

It was reckoned yesterday that a match staged specifically to tap into two of New York's main ethnic groups had sold just 7,000 tickets, with perhaps twice that number expected inside the 80,000 capacity venue for the kick-off.

Most of those will probably be Ecuadorians. The city's Irish population is ageing, with many of those who arrived in the last significant wave from across the Atlantic a decade and half ago now married with kids and settled in the suburbs. The weakness of the Ireland squad and the hassle involved for many in getting to New Jersey after work has made the game look like more trouble than it's worth.

On Saturday evening I realised the full extent of the lack of interest at a dinner hosted by a friend living here since the early 1990s which was attended, among others, by Irish members of an amateur team for whom he has been playing while living here. Most had travelled to Japan and South Korea five years ago to see Ireland play. A couple still devotedly follow the progress of favourite teams back in the League of Ireland. Just one intends to make the journey to Meadowlands.

It's the sort of stuff that has baffled those who have championed football in cities across the US, but particularly in New York, for a century or so. The interest of significant sections of the population in the game is evident from the huge numbers who play and the substantial revenues paid to cable stations here who show games from Europe and South America. The indifference of the media and wider public to games that take place on their doorstep, however, is all too obvious.

It's not a new phenomenon. The sport's most successful venture of the modern era in New York involved the star-studded Cosmos team of the mid and late 1970s. At one stage the club were routinely attracting crowds of more than 60,000 to Meadowlands as well as substantial television audiences. But the attraction centred almost entirely on the presence of stars like Franz Beckenbauer and particularly Pele, who arrived here in June 1975 on a three-year deal worth $2.8 million - more than he had earned in all of his career up until then.

The club had to paint their barren pitch at Randall's Island (where most of Saturday's male diners have played at one point or another) green in order to make it look more presentable to the Brazilian, but the world's greatest player accepted all his new employers' shortcomings with good grace and his presence had the desired effect.

Back then most team members were paid just $50 a week to play at the outset and some continued to receive a pittance even after the arrival of the superstars. Things haven't changed too much, for while David Beckham's contract with the LA Galaxy is reported to be worth $5.5 million a year and Ronnie O'Brien earns around $250,000 in Toronto, the money at the lower end of the scale remains ludicrous. Former Kildare County winger Bryan Byrne, for instance, who now plays at New England Revolution after a good college career at Santa Barbara, is among those in their first year in the league to receive a basic annual salary of just $23,000, according to the players' union here.

The clubs, however, are turning themselves around, often by revamping their business models and building smaller stadiums that save on rent and generate other revenue streams.

The former Metrostars have more or less given up on New York and its immigrant population, seeking instead to concentrate on New Jersey. The way things are shaping up for tomorrow, it might be some time before another promoter shows any more faith in the pulling power of the Irish around this neck of the woods.