Can ‘the ghetto’ really take over the county? ‘Race’, generation & social change in local football in the UK

Abstract

The involvement of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in local sports clubs is little used as a route for examining questions of their wider identity politics and exploring the impact of generational change in local sport. This is often because of difficulties involved in conducting qualitative research at the same site over an extended period. In this paper we report on two bouts of intensive ethnographic and interview study spanning a period of almost 20 years at a single African-Caribbean heritage football club in the city of Leicester, in the English east Midlands. Our findings suggest that considerable tensions have emerged over time inside the Meadbrooke Cavaliers club -tensions which threaten the historic cultural meaning of the club as a site for community solidarity, black masculine 'resistance' and identity formation. The commodification of local football in England from the early 1990s, signs of black occupational and social mobility and new 'race' dynamics for young black men in the city have all combined to reconfigure the role and meaning of the Cavaliers club in the lives of the local black communities which formed and have constituted the club since its founding in 1970.

Community sport development events, social capital and social mobility: a case study of Premier League Kicks and young black and minoritized ethnic males in England

“…A career as a professional football player has often been viewed by young Black and minoritised ethnic males from low socio-economic backgrounds as a tangible route to upward social mobility. 1 This belief is further amplified by media rhetoric which regularly features stories about Black and minoritised ethnic men who possess lucrative contracts, huge salaries, but who, outside of football, appeared to have little going for them; having experienced fragile childhoods, grown up in impoverished community settings, often infested with crime, gangrelated violence, unemployment and other indicators of deprivation. 2 In this context, sport, and football especially, has been identified as a kind of social panacea.…”

Sport and migration in the age of superdiversity

“…An increasing number of articles in IRSS have also examined sports in migration or the role of sports for minority ethnic and diaspora groups (e.g., Bradbury 2010, Burdsey 2010, Campbell and Williams 2013, Fletcher 2011, Krouwel et al 2006, Joseph 2012, Spracklen and Spracklen 2008, Thangaraj 2010). In the wake of the so-called refugee crisis around 2015, such literature has expanded further (e.g., Buser et al 2021, Dowling 2019, Kyeremeh 2019, McSweeney and Nakamura 2019.…”

“…In the wake of the so-called refugee crisis around 2015, such literature has expanded further (e.g., Buser et al 2021, Dowling 2019, Kyeremeh 2019, McSweeney and Nakamura 2019. This has led to specific attention being paid to racialized and politicised groups in sport, such as Muslim women (e.g., Kay 2006, Toffoletti and Palmer 2015, Lenneis, Evans and Agergaard 2022 and Black minority ethnic groups in western contexts (e.g., Adjepong 2019, Campbell and Williams 2013, Doidge 2013, Parry, Cleland and Kavanagh 2019.…”

‘We are all Foxes Now’: sport, multiculturalism and business in the era of Disneyization

“…The cost of a match ticket at the King Power typically ranged from £26 to £50. But the city's shifting ethnic diversity is also very strongly expressed today in local sport (Campbell and Williams, 2014;Bradbury, 2011). More recently and beyond this important diversity narrative, Leicester did briefly hit the international headlines, in 2012, by unearthing, in a city car park, the remains of a little admired, long-lost English king (Morris and Buckley, 2013).…”