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Abstract
This article provides a case study of the Amsterdam World Cup (WK Amsterdam), an annual amateur football competition and multicultural festival. Placing the event within the context of Dutch integration policy, it examines the differing and contested conceptions of identity, community and multiculturalism articulated by participants and organisers and, more broadly, the role that ‘alternative’ events play in resisting or reinforcing dominant political ideologies. Based on observational fieldwork, the analysis primarily addresses three main issues. First, it considers the extent to which the tournament provides a public space for community mobilisation and, as is the case with mainstream sporting events, the articulation of ethnic, national and gender identities. Second, it discusses associations between whiteness and national identity, and the role of alternative sporting events in facilitating the articulation of oppositional post‐colonial identities. Third, it evaluates the tournament's capacity to promote multiculturalism, cultural interaction and integration into a municipal Amsterdam identity. The article demonstrates that, whilst the tournament has the potential to play a significant role in challenging racism and destabilising white privilege in dominant local football cultures, aspects of the event – analogous to many other supposedly ‘alternative’ sport events – actually reproduce the inequalities and exclusionary practices of mainstream sport.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Floris Müller, Liesbet van Zoonen and Laurens de Roode for providing valuable information about Dutch football cultures and for introducing me to the Amsterdam World Cup. I am especially grateful to Floris for translations, ongoing dialogue regarding football and multiculturalism, and for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks are also due to Thomas Carter, Jayne Caudwell, Alan Tomlinson and Belinda Wheaton for their insightful comments and suggestions, and to the two anonymous Leisure Studies referees for their encouraging and constructive comments.
Notes
1. In 2008, a similar event will take place in Antwerp, Belgium (with eight teams), and there are plans to hold one in England (personal communication with René Blom, general producer, WK Amsterdam).
2. The size and status of the tournament means that players are now drawn from all over the Netherlands, not just Amsterdam.
3. In 2007, Youssouf Hersi – a former Dutch under‐21 international – of Twente Enschede represented Ethiopia. Other professionals involved in 2007 included Richmond Bossman (Stormvogels Telstar) for Ghana and Ahmed Ahahaoui (Go Ahead Eagles) for Morocco. AZ Alkmaar goalkeeper, Khalid Sinouh, was also present at the tournament, supporting Morocco. I am grateful to Laurens de Roode for this information.
4. This is particularly interesting considering that Boulahrouz has won over 20 caps for the Netherlands in his professional career, and it demonstrates how a sense of personal identification, rather than the eligibility criteria used by FIFA in the professional game, takes precedence at the tournament.
5. Tournament sponsors represent a diverse body of agencies and organisations including: the KNVB (Dutch National Football Federation) affiliated social inclusion programme Voetbal heft meer dan twee doelen (Football has more than two goals); Grolsch beer; Fun X and The Box, ‘urban’ music radio and television stations, respectively; Lebara, a low‐cost mobile telephone network that provides cheap calls to many of the nations from which Amsterdam's minority ethnic communities are drawn; and Spits, a free newspaper distributed on local rail transport.
6. These include Yes‐R, Gio, Beatkidz, Lady Di, Basic One, DJ Lady Ace, Ziggi and Kingz Salomon.
7. This is in contrast to Britain where references to terrorism are central to Islamophobic discourses in football (Burdsey, Citation2007a).
8. Identifying these broad migratory classifications is important in emphasising the heterogeneity of the migrant population in the Netherlands (Entzinger, Citation2003). However, it is also crucial to recognise the diversity within these categories and that migratory trajectories to the country differ in a variety of ways, including not simply the point of origin, but also the social class of migrants, the timing of migration, the perceptions and expectations of migrants and their reception by host communities (van Amersfoort & van Niekerk, Citation2006). It is therefore incorrect to speak of a singular migrant or minority experience in the Netherlands, although the common racialisation of such groups, particularly in the context of football, means that certain issues and problems are experienced commensurably.
9. In 2003, nearly one‐fifth of the Dutch population was comprised of minority ethnic communities (Vasta, Citation2007, p. 716). In 2006, the total population of Amsterdam was 743,027. In terms of ethnic origin, 69,645 of these were Surinamese, 65,426 were Moroccan, 38,337 were Turkish and 11,360 were Antillean (City of Amsterdam Research and Statistics, Citation2007).
10. Lijst Pim Fortuyn entered a coalition government which, due to internal tensions, lasted only 81 days.
11. For example, in 2006, the Christian Democratic Appeal party, the leading party in the coalition government, pledged to outlaw the wearing of the burqa, the full‐length body covering worn by some Muslim women.
12. Born in Somalia, Ali is a Muslim writer and member of the conservative liberal VVD Party. She gained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 (see, Ali, Citation2007). van Gogh was a Dutch film director who was murdered in 2004. Both became famous primarily due to their polemics against Islam after 9/11 and their collaboration on the film Submission, Part 1.
13. Plans are in place to introduce a women's competition at the 2008 tournament. This follows the debut of a small‐scale children's competition in 2007.
14. This position has been articulated by Rita Verdonk, Dutch Minister for Integration, who has argued that the emancipation of migrant women can only be achieved by following the path of white Dutch women (Roggeband & Verloo, Citation2007).
15. See Lechner (Citation2007) for a discussion on football and Dutch national identity.
16. In the Netherlands, the terms ‘Autochtonen’ (native Dutch) and ‘Allochtonen’ (foreigners) have official status.
17. The Netherlands Antilles consist of two groups of islands in the Caribbean: the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands. Colonised by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the Netherlands Antilles still form an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
18. Kim (Citation2004) points out that racism is contextually specific and this cannot be accounted for within the dominant notion of a vertical ethnic and racial hierarchy. Instead, the notion of ‘positionality’ provides a more dynamic model for understanding the experiences of minority ethnic groups. It recognises the situational nature of identity, and allows for the fluidity and complexity of ethnic relations and trajectories, i.e. the fact that groups can shift their position relative to others across time, and within different institutions and social settings. Fundamentally, positionality proclaims both the specificity of minority ethnic groups' experiences and the relationship between them, whilst also emphasising how disintegrating structures of racial difference and white privilege benefits all minority communities.
19. Dutch‐Surinamese players have been present in professional football throughout the post‐war era. Since the 1990s, a significant proportion of the national side has been comprised of players who were either born in Surinam (e.g. Edgar Davids, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Aron Winter) or were born in the Netherlands of Surinamese background (e.g. Ruud Gullit, Patrick Kluivert and Frank Rijkaard).