26 Ethnic sorting in football Secondly, Harrison (2001) suggests that athletic success of ethnic groups in specific sports can foster so-called ‘positive self-stereotypes’. This entails that individuals link their ethnic background to their capability to excel in certain sports. He notes that this process can be especially powerful in the case of ethnic minority groups, as these self-stereotypes can function as a form of pride in a context where minority groups tend be compared unfavourably to the majority group. If we reason in the opposite direction, however, this will also mean that a lack of athletic success and ethnic role models could highly diminish a sports appeal and direct interests to other sports or outside of the sports domain altogether. These notions lead to the following and final expectation: E5: Participation of ethnic minorities from countries where football on the amateur and/or elite level is relatively underdeveloped will be lower than that of other ethnic groups. 2.3 Methodology Data For the purpose of this study, the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) provided data of all club memberships from playing seasons 2005/2006 to 2014/2015. In addition to individual club memberships, these data contained individual members’ gender, date of birth and address. These individual characteristics were used to match these data with microdata from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), which contains the country of origin of Dutch citizens and their parents4. Around 94 percent of the roughly 2.2 million individual members from the original data were successfully matched with micro data from CBS. Figures on the countries of origin of the total Dutch population have been retrieved from StatLine (Statistics Netherlands). This is an openly accessible online platform maintained by CBS, through which Dutch country-level statistics based on the same data are published. 4 All presented results are based on calculations by the author using non-public microdata from Statistics Netherlands. Under certain conditions, these microdata are accessible for statistical and scientific research. For further information: microdata@cbs.nl.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw