Transcultural football. Trajectories of belonging among immigrant youth

Abstract

Football can play different roles in the lives of immigrant youth. It can be a site for leisure, sport performance and socialization. Even more critically, it can be a place where to negotiate sense of belonging to a local community and to gain access to national sporting cultures. Football can also represent forms of exclusion and discrimination. This article aims to elucidate the meanings that participation in football hold for black immigrant males in a country of recent immigration such as the Republic of Ireland. The article discusses the findings of a long-term ethnographic study with a youth team based in a working-class area of Dublin, the Irish capital. The youth football club plays a special role as a term of identification for the local community. Teenage players of different African backgrounds are presented with the challenge of acquiring different levels of inclusion. They can attempt to appropriate cultural codes that define local working-class men on and off the pitch or they can practice forms of ‘resistance’ that emphasize their own racialized positioning in Irish society. Overall, these dynamics affirm the importance of grassroots football as a venue for young people’s transcultural encounters.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Les Back, to the editors of this special issue and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The book was co-written with journalist Vincent Hogan.

2. McGrath, Back From the Brink, 72.

3. 1996 is the year when the net migration balance of the Republic of Ireland became positive with the influx of foreign population and Irish returning emigrants.

4. Burdsey, ‘They Think it’s All Over … It Isn’t Yet!’; Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics. ‘Soccer Fields of Cultural [Re]Production’; Giardina, ‘Bend it Like Beckam’; Rosbrook-Thomson, Sport, Difference and Belonging.

5. Amara et al., Sport and Multiculturalism.

6. This is the title of a long-term programme of the German Olympic Sports Federation.

7. This is the slogan of the Irish NGO Sport Against Racism Ireland, www.sari.ie (accessed December 22, 2013).

8. ‘Football: a shared sense of belonging?’ is the title of a collaborative research project carried out between 2009 and 2012 by the NGO Football Unites, Racism Divides with young asylum seekers and refugees in Sheffield, www.furd.org (accessed January 8, 2014).

9. Williams, ‘Rangers is a Black Club’.

10. Bradbury, ‘Racism, Resistance and New Youth Inclusions’.

11. Long et al., ‘Part of the Game?’.

12. Lusted, ‘Playing Games with “Race”’.

13. See for example Demboski, ‘Ballfreiheit’; Pilz, ‘Rote Karte Statt Integration?’; Soefner and Zifonun, ‘Migranten Im Deutschen Vereinfussball’.

14. Back et al., The Changing Face of Football, 287.

15. Carter, In Foreign Fields; Holmes and Storey, ‘Transferring National Allegiances’; Poli, ‘The Denationalization of Sport’.

16. Walseth, ‘Sport and Belonging’; Rosbrook-Thomson, Sport, Difference and Belonging.

17. Quoted in Walseth, ‘Sport and Beloning’, 449.

18. Hooks, Belonging. A Culture of Place.

19. Maxwell et al., ‘Social Inclusion in Community Sport’.

20. Hoerder et al., Negotiating Transcultural Lives, 14.

21. Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game.

22. Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 901.

23. A couple of exceptions: Hassan and McCue, ‘The “Silent” Irish’; Mauro, ‘A Team Like no “Other”’.

24. Gilligan et al., In the Frontline of Integration; Ni Laoire et al., Childhood and Migration in Europe; Darmody et al., The Changing Faces of Ireland.

25. Connor, Youth Sport in Ireland; Delaney and Fahey, School Children and Sport in Ireland; Lalor et al., Young People in Contemporary Ireland; Woods et al., The Children’s Sport Participation.

26. Biesta et al., ‘Does Sport Make a Difference?’.

27. Raby, ‘Across a Great Gulf’, 47.

28. Sinha and Back, ‘Making Methods Sociable’.

29. Clarke et al., Understanding Research With Children and Young People.

30. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography, 282.

31. Rouch and Feld, Ciné-Ethnography.

32. Willis and Trondman, ‘Manifesto for Ethnography’, 394.

33. Loescher, ‘Cameras at the Addy’.

34. Clifford, Routes; Duneier, Sidewalk; Marcus, ‘Contemporary Fieldwork’.

35. 2011 National Census.

36. http://www.sfai.ie/ (accessed October 16, 2014).

37. The name of the club as all the names of the participants have been anonymized.

38. In the Greenside area, home to about 8000 people, 22.94% of the population fall into the category of ‘youth at risk’, while the overall average for Dublin’s of 18.3% and the State 20.4% (Ryan, Socio-Economic Profile of Greenside Parish).

39. Connor, Youth Sport in Ireland, and Faye et al., School Children and Sport in Ireland.

40. Lentin and McVeigh, After Optimism; Loyal, ‘Immigration’.

41. Fannin et al., Taking Racism Seriously; Kennedy, Treated differently?

42. Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game, 74.

43. Rosbrook-Thompson, Sport, Difference and Belonging; King, ‘Race and Cultural Identity’, Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics.

44. Doherty and Taylor, ‘Sport and Physical Recreation in the Settlement of Immigrant Youth’; Harinen et al. ‘Multiculturalism and Young People’s Leisure Spaces in Finland’; Stack and Iwasaki, ‘The Role of Leisure Pursuits in Adaptation Processes Among Afghan Refugees’; Verma and Larson, ‘Examining Adolescent Leisure Time Across Cultures’.

45. Doherty and Taylor, ‘Sport and Physical Recreation in the Settlement of Immigrant Youth’, 44.

46. Huizinga, Homo Ludens.

47. Fine, With the Boys, 188.

48. Dyck, Fields of Play.

49. Ferguson made his comment in December 2010 and soon afterwards the International Football Association Board banned the use of snoods from professional football. BBC News, 5 March 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/9415721.stm (accessed April 30, 2013).

50. Cronin, Sport and Nationalism in Ireland; Sugden and Bairner, Sport, Sectarianism and Society in a Divided Ireland.

51. Archetti, Masculinities, Football, Polo, and the Tango in Argentina.

52. Back et al., The Changing Face of Football, 285.

53. Hylton, ‘Race’ and Sport. Critical Race Theory, 18.

54. Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, 205.

55. Bell, Performativity and Belonging, 3.

56. Carrington, ‘Sport, Masculinity and Black Cultural Resistance’, 299.

57. Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture.

58. Loyal, ‘Postmodern Othering or Established-Outsiders Relations?’, 142.

59. The hair was shaven to blade one or blade two, usually with a small fringe of longer hair arranged over their foreheads.

60. Hoerder et al., Negotiating Transcultural Lives, 15.

61. Bhabha, ‘Culture's In-Between’.

62. Mac Dougall, The Corporeal Image.

63. This echoes one of the recommendations of the EU Report on Sport and Multiculturalism, Amara et al., Sport and Multiculturalism, 85. In 2007, the FAI, with the support of UEFA, launched its first ‘Intercultural Plan’. According to Hassan and McCue, ‘this plan, which promised so much, has come unstuck due to a weakness in its implementation’; ‘Football, Racism and the Irish’, 62.