Chapter 2. Ethnic participation in Dutch amateur football clubs 23 members to effectively access a sports organization and become or stay on as a member, regardless of their financial resources. If ethnic differences in economic and cultural resources would have a substantial impact on amateur football club participation, we would expect the participation of various ethnic groups to be stratified accordingly. This would mean that ethnic groups which tend to have less economic and/or cultural resources will show relatively low participation rates in amateur football. Furthermore, assimilation theory would lead us to expect that participation of ethnic minority groups, especially in the case of relatively disadvantaged groups, will rise over time and between subsequent generations as a result of their socioeconomic and cultural integration in the host society (Alba & Nee, 1997; Vogels, 2014). This leads to the first two expectations for this chapter: E1: Ethnic minority groups with relatively few economic or cultural resources will be underrepresented in amateur football compared to ethnic groups with more economic or cultural resources. E2: Ethnic minority participation in amateur football will increase over time due to the accumulation of economic and cultural resources. Ethnic prejudice and discrimination Even when ethnic minority groups might possess the resources necessary to participate in leisure activities they might be constrained in their ability to do so because of ethnic prejudice and discriminatory practices.2 Prejudice is something many individuals belonging to ethnic minorities face and which, through experiences with discrimination or anticipation thereof, acts as a barrier or deterrent to participation in various social spheres, including the domain of sports (Stodolska & Floyd, 2016). While sports settings on average rank relatively low in terms of places where Dutch citizens report unwanted behaviour, including discrimination, amateur football clubs are overrepresented (Schipper-van Veldhoven & Steenbergen, 2014). Furthermore, there have been multiple known examples of clubs showing inclinations to formally exclude (certain) ethnic minorities from membership. While these inclinations were not formalized, they 2 Discrimination is less often directly associated with the marginality perspective. However, as a form of ethnic disadvantage and constraint on participation it fits with its underlying assumptions.
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