‘We Are Not As Bad as you Think we Are’: Dealing with Diversity and Self-Exclusion in a Youth Football Club

Abstract

Few studies have considered the capacity of place to facilitate or inhibit supportive responses to diversity. In this paper, we explore this capacity of place through an ethnographic case study of responses to diversity in a football club based in Antwerp, Belgium. Over a three year period we assessed the effects of three separate placedbased initiatives by the football club to promote inclusion of native Belgians in a football club that has become predominantly composed of people with migrant backgrounds. This paper demonstrates that initiatives which were based in places with normative values which promote diversity, acceptance and mutual respect delivered more positive outcomes for inclusion of native Belgians than in places without such norms and values.