Chapter 3. Do birds of a feather play football together? 69 Moroccan backgrounds, which could be partly explained by their shared religion. However, the difference between this segregation and segregation between members with Turkish backgrounds and other groups is relatively small. Moreover, members with Moroccan backgrounds are in turn less segregated from members with Surinamese and Antillean backgrounds than from members with Turkish backgrounds. This does not seem to align with the idea that the Muslim / non-Muslim distinction acts as an important boundary for sorting members over clubs. While this distinction might play an exclusionary role and partly explains the high inbreeding of members with Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds, it does not seem to have an inclusionary effect. Therefore, I decide to reject the fourth and final expectation of this chapter. 3.5 Conclusions and discussion In this chapter I have taken a closer look at ethnic inbreeding homophily in comembership ties obtained in the Netherlands’ most popular associational sport. The research question guiding this chapter was: To what extent are ethnic groups within the Netherlands unequally distributed over amateur football clubs? In line with the homophily principle, I find that clubs on average provide substantially more ingroup co-membership ties than the composition of the total member population would suggest. This goes to show that even when a sport can count on high interest and participation across a wide range of ethnic groups - which is far from always the case - there are limitations on its ability to link people with different ethnic backgrounds together. I proposed two factors that could partly drive differences in groups’ degree of inbreeding and co-membership ties with various other groups. The first factor was group size. This does seem to be associated with higher levels of inbreeding for minority groups, suggesting that bigger numbers allow for more homophilic tie-formation and/or that new members gravitate to clubs with ethnic peers. Consequently, we should not assume that democratization of sports and increases in minority participation automatically translate to interethnic mixing at the club
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