130 Ethnic sorting in football part of the majority group. For citizens with migrant backgrounds, however, the opposite holds true. Unlike their counterparts, they will struggle to find one club, let alone multiple clubs, in their area in which most of the members have the same ethnic background. Moreover, when clubs have substantial shares of members with migrant backgrounds, this tends to go hand in hand with higher levels of organization heterogeneity, which also leads to member turnover. This means that, while perhaps counterintuitive, disparities in membership rates and membership duration between citizens with Dutch and migrant backgrounds arise because people are in fact similar, not different. To put it simply, people want the same thing, but clubs offer two contrasting membership experiences. For people with Dutch backgrounds, club membership most often coincides with a majority position and a high degree of ethnic similarity. For people with migrant backgrounds, it often goes hand in hand with a minority position and/or a high degree of ethnic dissimilarity. The latter makes membership substantially less appealing and more fragile, regardless of ethnic background. This then also implies that to understand and address ethnic disparities in sports club membership, we must account for the differing degrees of ethnic similarity club membership has to offer. As outlined before, this is for an important part determined by the unequal distribution of backgrounds in the Dutch population. Overall, citizens with Dutch backgrounds have a clear advantage over citizens with migrant backgrounds. In turn, large minority groups such as the Dutch with Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds have slightly more possibilities than smaller minority groups. At the same time, however, clubs are local organizations, and it is therefore important to consider that local contexts may differ substantially. People with different backgrounds do not spread equally over municipalities and neighbourhoods. For example, most people with migrant backgrounds live in, or close to big cities which can lead to strong differences in meeting opportunities between rural and urban areas. In bigger cities, important differences may still manifest themselves on the neighbourhood level. The amount of football clubs and their location can play another important role in the extent to which club membership enables or constrains contact with similar others. A dense network of football clubs that are easy to reach, allows for substantially more ethnic sorting than when clubs are few and far between.
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