20 Ethnic sorting in football 2015; Higgins & Dale, 2013; Johnston, Delva, & O’Malley, 2007; Nielsen, Hermansen, Bugge, Dencker, & Andersen, 2013; Stamatakis & Chaudhury, 2008; Vogels, 2014; Wijtzes et al., 2014). This gap limits the potential of sports as a shared activity to bring people with various ethnic backgrounds together. Furthermore, it leads to an unequal ethnic distribution of the potential additional benefits that sports activities bring beyond leisure, such as opportunities for social capital formation (Janssens & Verweel, 2014) and positive (indirect) effects on health (Basterfield et al., 2015; Hardie Murphy, Rowe, & Woods, 2016; Pate, Trost, Levin, & Dowda, 2000). There appears to be a lack of clarity about the reasons for the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in sports. Authors taking a critical approach have stressed the prevalence of exclusionary factors, most notably the unequal ethnic distribution of resources and discrimination, which favour participation of the dominant ethnic group over minority groups (Collins, 2014; Elling & Claringbould, 2005). However, it remains difficult to generalize findings from studies which typically use qualitative methods and rely on specific cases or limited data. Moreover, as ethnicity also seems to be related to differing sports participation interests (Elling & Knoppers, 2005; Harrison, Lee, & Belcher, 1999), it becomes challenging to disentangle processes of exclusion from ethnic differences in preferences. Furthermore, most quantitative studies on ethnic sports participation so far have suffered from a few drawbacks, further complicating matters. Firstly, categorizations used for ethnic groups tend to be relatively few and broad. As experiences and positions within countries can vary substantially between ethnic groups, frequently used terms such as ‘immigrant background’ or ‘non-white’ may obscure substantial differences. Secondly, the use of longitudinal data has been scarce up until now. This means that we know relatively little about how time and demographic change are related to ethnic differences in sport participation. Thirdly, definitions of sports participation are quite often rather general. As interest and participation of ethnic groups could vary substantially between different types of sports, between popular and less popular sports, individual and team sports, and organized and non-organized sports, we would benefit from more specific accounts of ethnic sports participation. A distinctive characteristic of the sports domain in Europe is its strong reliance on a network of sports clubs and overarching federations (Bottenburg et al., 2005). With both Europe’s highest estimated share of sports activities taking
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