CHAPTER 6 Ethnicity matters This dissertation began with the Springboks’ 1995 Rugby World Cup triumph as a reminiscing example of sports’ promise as a powerful ethnic integrator. As many countries have substantially diversified along ethnic lines in the past decades, pressures to harness this power to strengthen social ties between citizens with different ethnic backgrounds have mounted. The organized sports domain appears to be especially appealing in this respect. Membership ties to sports clubs link an astonishing number of citizens to one another. Consequently, it seems only logical that sports clubs are ideal locales for interethnic tie-formation. While sports clubs no doubt have a lot of potential in bringing people closer together, past research suggests that ethnic differences may also act as a social fault line. Not only are sports sometimes interpreted or used in ways to strengthen ethnic identities, but some research suggests that people favour membership ties to clubs that specifically link them to ethnic peers. To better understand how ethnic background and sports club membership interrelate, this dissertation focused on the Netherlands' most popular organized sport, amateur football. By combining membership data of all Dutch football clubs in the Netherlands with data on the ethnic backgrounds of Dutch citizens, it has for become possible to extensively study the relationship between ethnic background and club membership quantitatively. To guide this objective, I have formulated the following main research question: What is the impact of ethnic background on membership ties to Dutch football clubs? In this dissertation, I have broken down this main research question into four distinct and more specific research questions. Each of these research questions was addressed in a separate empirical chapter. In this chapter, I will begin with summarizing the findings of these four chapters. Subsequently, I will discuss their implications in light of the main research question and highlight what I believe
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