The Jackson Heights Connection: How Queens Shaped NYCFC’s Soul
Long before NYCFC played a single game at Yankee Stadium, the sidewalks, courts, and community pitches of Queens had already written the club’s identity — and the neighborhood’s relationship with the team runs deeper than most fans realize.
By Nathalie Richard · July 25, 2026 · 5 min read
JACKSON HEIGHTS, Queens — On a Tuesday evening in late July, the concrete pitch at Diversity Plaza is running three games deep. Kids in Boca Juniors kits share space with men in worn NYCFC jerseys and teenagers playing in Chelsea blue. Someone has chalk-stenciled “Vamos City” on the wall behind one of the goals. The city’s official soccer club is in the Bronx. The soul of it, many here will tell you, is in Queens.
Jackson Heights has been home to one of New York’s most vibrant soccer cultures for decades, sustained by the Ecuadorian, Colombian, Mexican, and Bangladeshi communities that make the neighborhood one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. When NYCFC was founded in 2015, the club’s leadership made a deliberate decision to engage this community not as a marketing exercise but as a foundational relationship.
That decision has taken concrete form over the past eleven years. NYCFC runs a grassroots program — City in the Community — that operates out of ten sites across Queens and the Bronx, providing free coaching, equipment, and match opportunities for approximately 3,000 young players annually. In Jackson Heights alone, the club funds three after-school programs and an adult recreational league that draws more than 200 participants each week.
“These aren’t our fans because we asked them to be,” said Miguel Torres, NYCFC’s director of community engagement. “These are our fans because this is their game. We just showed up and tried to be part of something that was already here.” Torres, himself a Jackson Heights native, has led the community program since 2018.
The relationship has produced tangible results on the field as well. Three current members of NYCFC’s academy system were identified through community programs in Queens. One of them, a 16-year-old midfielder from Corona who asked not to be named in advance of his signing, is widely considered the club’s most promising youth prospect in five years.
As construction on NYCFC’s new Willets Point stadium accelerates a few miles away, Jackson Heights watches with a mixture of pride and the reasonable anxiety of a community that has seen New York’s promises not always materialize. Torres is optimistic. “When that stadium opens, it’s going to feel like ours,” he said, watching the evening games wind down at Diversity Plaza. “Because in a real way, it already is.”