14 Ethnic sorting in football study will help to fill this gap by explicitly studying how ethnic background relates to membership of the Netherlands’ most popular and numerous voluntary association. Thirdly, this study adds to a broader sociological debate on the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on social cohesion. When Putnam in 2007 posited that mutual ethnic differences within a population erode sociability and lead to ‘hunkering down’ behaviour, this sparked a lively scholarly and political discussion on the social consequences of the ethnic differentiation of European countries and the United States. While some scholars have argued that the effect suggested by Putnam is an artifact of cultural differences (Abascal & Baldassarri, 2015), and yet others have suggested that it is an American exception (Van der Meer & Tolsma, 2014), several recent studies have demonstrated that ethnic heterogeneity may indeed undermine aspects of social cohesion (Dinesen et al., 2020; Jennissen et al., 2018). Most research on this topic so far has focused on neighbourhood residency. This may partly explain why findings have been mixed. Not only is the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and social cohesion in neighbourhoods at risk to be obfuscated by other factors such as economic deprivation or crime, but people can have widely different ideas about what their neighbourhood is and who lives in it. Koopmans et al. (2015) have therefore suggested that the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and social cohesion is best studied in concrete social settings in which people have frequent face to face contact. From this point of view the study of amateur football clubs has a lot to offer. Not only are they an organization through which so many Dutch citizens meet and interact with one another, but these interactions are also voluntary in nature. This makes the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on membership ties much easier to observe, compared to more constrained contexts such as professional organization or schools. 1.4 Methodological approach Following from the aims and central research question, this study employs a quantitative research design. The main objective of this design is to map the Dutch citizens’ membership ties to amateur football clubs and relate them to their ethnic backgrounds. For this purpose, the Royal Dutch Football Association has provided me under strict conditions of use with anonymized individual
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