128 Ethnic sorting in football on the expected and experienced benefits and costs of membership. This makes them ideal organizations to study membership dynamics, as opposed to contexts that are (more) constrained, such as professional, educational and health care organizations, or places of residence. Second, amateur football clubs are face to face organizations. Reaping the benefits of membership requires physical co-presence, which, compared to some other contexts, makes it relatively likely that members directly experience the ethnic composition of their organization. Lastly, the unwaning popularity of amateur football in the Netherlands, especially among citizens with migrant backgrounds, combined with the high number and balanced distribution of clubs across the country, put relatively few constraints on membership in comparison to other, less popular sports or other types of organizations. This made amateur football a very fitting case to study the relationship between ethnic background and membership in more detail. Limitations At the same time, however, this study also came with its own set of challenges and limitations. First of all, partly due to this study’s emphasis on large amounts of objective data, I was not able to incorporate more subjective data on the attitudes or experiences of members. Such data would have given a more detailed insight into the mechanisms and pathways involved in the ethnic sorting of members in amateur football. Another limitation of this study is the lack of team data within clubs. Contrary to the club membership data, these data were unfortunately not accessible nor reliable. Additionally, it must be noted that not all members actively play in teams. However, because - for playing members - the most frequent and intense contacts are bound to occur with members of one’s own team, it would have been beneficial to separate both levels and take into account how team compositions either mediate or moderate the relationship between club composition and membership. As of now it remains unknown if and, if so, to what extent the relation between club heterogeneity and member dropout is a product of team heterogeneity. A final limitation that warrants mentioning is that the geographical location of the clubs remained unknown in this study. Knowing where clubs are located would have allowed to study the interrelations between club composition, the ethnic composition of their geographical area, and vicinity of other competing clubs or organization in more detail.
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