Football, Ethnicity and Community

Winner of the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2017 This book is a case study of an African-Caribbean-founded football club, Meadebrook Cavaliers, from the English East Midlands. Covering the years 1970 to 2010, it seeks to address the paucity of research on the British African-Caribbean male experience in leisure and sport as well as on the relationship between «race» and local-level football. The development of the club was intimately connected to wider changes in the social and sporting terrain. Based on a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the book examines the clubs growth over four decades, exploring the attitudes, social realities and identity politics of its African-Caribbean membership and the varying demands and expectations of the wider black community. In doing so, it shows how studies of minority ethnic and local football clubs can shed light on the changing social identities and cultural dynamics of the communities that constitute them.

Paul Ian Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Sport Culture, Media and Development, Special Needs and Inclusion Studies and Education at the University of Wolverhampton. His work focuses on race, ethnicity and identity from a historical, sociological and cultural studies viewpoint.

Contents: Combining history and sociology to write «black» sport – Immigration in Britain: Leicester and the first-generation of African-Caribbeans c.1900-1968 – Finding their feet: Grassroots football, Meadebrook Cavaliers and the second-generation black experience in Leicester – From parks team to football club: Social policy, generational change and grassroots football in Leicester – Re-inventing Cavaliers: Recession, modernisation and processes of «respectability» – Questions of «resistance» in local football in Leicester – «Real» solutions for «real» problems? Community development, cultural cohesion and local football.