‘It’s like being close to home’: World Cup vibes immaculate in richly diverse New York

Fans of all stripes pack the bars to sing, cheer and commiserate in city where more than 3m people were born outside US

Almost 200,000 Ecuadorians and Ecuadorian Americans live in New York City, and last week quite a lot of them were in a Brooklyn restaurant called El Encebollado de Victor to watch their football team take on Germany – a traditional World Cup powerhouse.

It made for quite a sight: a sea of yellow shirts under the restaurant’s blue roof, which had been adorned with red, blue and yellow balloons for the occasion. Among the most patriotically dressed was Luis Aguilar, 45, who was born in the US to parents who had emigrated from Ecuador.

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