This article, therefore, aims to identify the different forms of informal football in a working-class multicultural neighbourhood in the Netherlands, their in- and exclusion mechanisms, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these forms of street football.
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Informal sports can mean both the unregulated free leisure time of youth but also government-funded social integration projects in urban neighbourhoods that are much alike the sport-for-development programmes often taking place in the Global South and everything in between.
To understand the specific impact of COVID-19 on informal sport, urban public space and social inequalities, it is necessary to identify the different forms that informal sport can take in urban areas, especially in urban working-class and multicultural areas where informal urban sports such as street football are popular (Elling & Knoppers, 2005 Lucassen, 2021). Such inequalities are often configured spatially (van Ingen, 2003) they do not occur simply in public sport spaces but are shaped through the policing, restricting and enabling of spatial practices of different kinds of bodies in sport spaces. For example, people with the lowest wages working in sport clubs were often the first ones to lose their jobs, and COVID-19 restrictions in sport could stimulate the “othering” of specific vulnerable groups, such as older people or ones with chronic diseases, with exclusion and stigmatisation as result (Evans et al., 2020 Slot-Heijs et al., 2020). Restrictions impacted specifically upon marginalised communities and in informal sports, for which urban public space is often the main location.Įxisting mechanisms of inequality and exclusion were reproduced or even enlarged in sports during covid times: early studies suggest that the pandemic has increased existing social inequalities in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, age, class and their intersections. The relation between urban public space, inequality, and spatial practices such as sport gained a new meaning in the COVID-19 lockdowns, one in which the restriction of public space and spatial practices was more common than “normal”. In some contexts, football-playing boys with non-white backgrounds even became policed more strongly (Woodrow & Moore, 2021). For many young (migrant) residents in working-class urban spaces, however, playing informal sport during the pandemic turned out to be rather a disillusion: their most popular sport, street football, was also forbidden due to covid regulations that restrict public gatherings, and the closure of public parks (Duncan et al., 2020). This was a recourse for many sport-minded people. As gyms and sport clubs were closed for many months, in the Netherlands for almost a year in total, informal sports such as running and biking often continued to be practiced and allowed, be it individually or with a 1.5 m distance in very small groups. It thereby contributes to the literature on informal sport by adding an explicit intersectional and spatial analysis, and explores the impact of COVID-19 on informal sport.ĭuring the recent COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in countries across the world, informal sports were both a blessing and a disillusion. Finally, the article traces the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on informal football and urban inequalities. Informal football practices are analysed as spatial politics: the ways in which politics of identity and of in- and exclusion are managed spatially. I will show how each of these forms has their own intersectional in- and exclusion mechanisms shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, religion, and class, and argue that these three forms of informal football in urban public spaces are in fact highly regulated. Based on ethnographic research with Muslim youth playing street football, the article identifies three forms of informal football in Dutch multicultural neighbourhoods, namely: unorganised non-time bound street football municipality-organised football and community-organised “grassroots” football. This article challenges this idea of informal sport and analyses informal sport in a multicultural urban neighbourhood as a form of sport that has the potential for increasing social equality and inclusion. In the Netherlands, informal youth sports such as community football are mainly seen as a bridge towards (paid) membership of regular sport clubs and not valued as sport itself.
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