10 Ethnic sorting in football achieving this is to stimulate positive and durable contact experiences between individuals from different ethnic backgrounds. Consequently, policy makers have been highly interested in social settings which are suitable for interethnic mixing and socializing. The implicit or explicit assumption in Dutch sports policies is that sports clubs can and in fact should play an important role in this. Not only do these clubs revolve around a shared activity which is believed to already cut across ethnic boundaries, but they are also by far the most popular type of civil society organization in the country, therefore acting as primary social foci for the formation and maintenance of ties with others. This is well illustrated by the fact that roughly a quarter of the total Dutch population is a member of a sports club and consequently clubs provide the settings where millions of citizens meet each other in these setting on a weekly basis. Some evidence suggests that organized sports do indeed have a promising potential when it comes to interethnic mixing. Members or ex-members of sports clubs tend to have more contact with, and have more trust in people with different ethnic backgrounds than non-members (Van der Meulen, 2010), and participation in organized sports can go hand in hand with increased knowledge and understanding of one’s ethnic outgroup and interethnic friendships (Janssens et al., 2010; Verweel et al., 2005). These effects, however, seem to be relatively modest in nature. Moreover, there is also reason to believe that ethnicity acts as a social divider in organized sports, which in turn would put limits on or even problematize the bridging function sports clubs are expected to fulfil. Ethnicity as a social divider in organized sport Despite its attractiveness, the use of sports clubs as ethnic integrators has been met with critical scrutiny. Evidence which substantiates the integrative function of sports remains scarce and some studies show that ethnic background itself can have an important role in diverging sports interests, participation rates and experiences of individuals. Firstly, while it may be true that organized sports are relatively accessible in comparison to other social domains, a consistent finding in research on sports participation and ethnicity is that ethnic minorities tend to be substantially underrepresented in organized sports. Secondly, people with different ethnic backgrounds do not necessarily gravitate to the same type of sports. Janssens et al. (2010) show that ethnic groups can have strongly diverging ‘sport profiles’,
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