not doubting that was the local angle because i caught a whiff of it on reddit but curious what your source was.

i did read this past week that soccer has passed hockey as the fourth most popular spectator sport in america but i assume that is based on viewing habits primarily of world soccer and not mls driven. still, average attendance for the nhl is about 17500 while in probably half the games per season the mls pre-covid was over 21000 in admittedly larger venues.

Mostly mainstream local TV news and the Post. The TV stations still maintain a sports reporter, but have largely relegated coverage to the crawl at the bottom of the screen. The Post is heavily invested in sports, but NYCFC was not the lead story on the back page, though there was a banner at the top proclaiming "City's first champs since Giants!" Only one page with one report inside, compared to the endless sidebars about NFL and NBA (and that's not counting all the betting stuff.)