CHAPTER 3 Do birds of a feather play football together? 3.1 Sports clubs: sites for interethnic mixing? All across the globe, sports – especially when organized within the context of clubs – are lauded for their ability to cut across ethnic or racial boundaries. As a consequence, policy makers in the Netherlands and elsewhere have increasingly put their faith in sports clubs as easy and effective sites for interethnic mixing and fostering cohesion in an ethnically heterogeneous society. However, in the past, various scholars have expressed their scepticism towards the idea that sports clubs are particularly effective at bringing people with various ethnic backgrounds together. For example, Krouwel, Boonstra, Duyvendak & Veldboer (2006) find that the majority of Dutch adolescents belonging to ethnic minority groups in their study voice a strong preference for football clubs with ethnic peers. Similarly, Vermeulen and Verweel (2009) observe indications of bonding around ethnic identities during sports activities inside and outside clubs, by ethnic minority as well as majority groups. Furthermore, Wiertz (2016) finds proof for pronounced ethnic sorting tendencies when individuals join various civic associations, including sports clubs. These findings echo what has been called the homophily principle: the phenomenon that socially similar individuals associate more frequently than dissimilar individuals (McPherson & Smith-Lovin, 1987). Reviewing more than a hundred studies spanning multiple decades, McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (2001) illustrate the pervasiveness of homophily in our lives. Many of the connections we make, from marriage to mere knowledge of others, show a general bias towards others with whom we share social similarities, vastly limiting our social worlds. Ethnicity is found to be one of the most important characteristics through which similarity breeds connection. Consequently, it acts as a major social fault line in people’s personal networks (McPherson et al., 2001). Additionally, while
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