CHAPTER 2 Ethnic participation in Dutch amateur football clubs 2.1 Amateur football: a reflection of society? Over the past decades, many affluent democracies have rapidly diversified along ethnic lines due to immigration, a trend which is only expected to continue in the future. To ensure cohesion between citizens in light of these new differences, policy makers have increasingly put their faith in sports and especially cluborganized sports activities (Elling, De Knop, & Knoppers, 2001; Krouwel, Boonstra, Duyvendak, & Veldboer, 2006; Vermeulen & Verweel, 2009). The instrumental use of sports for addressing ethnic differences by policy makers can be understood as part of the emergence of a much wider, global discourse underpinning the proliferation of the ‘Sport for development and peace’ (SDP) sector since the turn of the century (Giulianotti, 2011; Kidd, 2008). Central to this discourse is the representation of sports as an inherently open and integrative social domain, wherein the entry and movement of both people and their associated capital are largely unaffected by social structure, especially ethnic background. Various sport sociological scholars (Coakley, 2009; Collins, 2014; Giulianotti, 2016; Jarvie, 1991) have resisted this popular conceptualization of sports. They argue that sports participants are not disconnected from, but instead embedded within a social world marked by difference, barriers, inequalities, and conflict, making the sports domain much less of the neutral and level playing field policy makers believe or hope it to be. Ethnic disparities in sports participation are a case in point. Multiple studies have shown that despite the democratization of sports, sports participation still tends to be ethnically stratified. In general, ethnic minorities tend to be less active in sports than their majority counterparts and they are less likely to participate in club-organized sports (Bottenburg, Rijnen, & Sterkenburg, 2005; Coumans,
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