96 Ethnic sorting in football members’ likelihood to drop out, but different ingroup shares also prove to be a key driver of the disparity in dropout between members with migrant or Dutch backgrounds. Two other explanations specifically considered the composition of one’s ethnic outgroup. Reasoning from a group threat perspective, it was suggested that the presence of a homogeneous outgroup would maximize experiences and perceptions of group threat and therefore further drive up member dropout, while from a social disarray perspective it was argued that the presence of an ethnically fractured outgroup fuels dropout because it makes social connections more complicated and uncomfortable. In this study I found that the dropout of individual members correlates positively with the degree of ethnic fractionalization of the outgroup. The findings further indicated that members with Dutch backgrounds or with migrant backgrounds are both affected by differences in relative ingroup size and outgroup fractionalization in generally the same way. The effects for members with migrant backgrounds are slightly weaker than for members with a Dutch background, however. This is most likely caused by a more constrained opportunity structure and more contact experiences with outgroup members. Several implications can be drawn from these results. First and foremost, the outcomes of the analyses are illustrative of homophily’s pervasiveness in our social lives. While much of the past research on the homophily principle has focused on tie-formation rather than dissolution (McPherson et al., 2001), this study demonstrates that homophilic sorting does not end once the initial hurdle of entry is taken – as previously suggested by Wiertz (2016). Selective exit appears to be the other side of the same coin through which the ethnic segregation of groups is maintained and homophilic preferences are - more or less successfully - satisfied. Furthermore, ever since Putnam (2007) has argued that ethnic fractionalization has an independent constricting effect on sociability, the negative social consequences of ethnic heterogeneity have been a contentious issue in the social sciences. A primary topic of debate has been whether fractionalization actually has a negative effect on its own, or whether it is merely an artefact of other causes which have not been properly accounted for, most notably, ingroup size (Abascal & Baldassarri, 2015; Meer & Tolsma, 2014). In line with recent literature (Dinesen et al., 2020; Jennissen et al., 2018; Koopmans & Schaeffer, 2015), this study finds renewed support for the idea that the
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