Abstract des Autors

Football clubs catering for a certain nationality or persons of a certain ethnic origin are increasingly thought of as “single-community clubs”, on the basis of a logic of cultural influence according to which those who come together in such a context identify with the “community” concerned, invariably as reflected by the club. As well as being rather ambiguous, cultural identity and community are sometimes far more telling about users’ ways of thinking and social perceptions than about immigrant populations and sport as such. In France, for instance, where citizenship is regarded as contrasting with the concept of community (Donzelot, 2003), our “cultural subconscious” strongly encourages us to consider the grouping within certain football clubs of players and officials from a single country of origin to indicate that they wish to cut themselves off, following separatist, or even “communitarian” logic. If this wish to cut themselves off exists, is it solely the immigrants’ fault, or is it partly due to the way in which the host society considers them, and to a form of “ethnic discrimination” against a population group of foreign origin? For the purposes of this paper, we shall define “ethnic discrimination” as being objectively unfavourable treatment of individuals on the basis of their supposed origin (Lorcerie, 2008). We shall therefore, on the basis of a survey of sports club participation by Turks in France and Germany, start by offering evidence of their withdrawal into their own identity group in the sporting sphere, and then compare official French and German policies on integration through sport. Our third step will be to show how the way in which Turkish footballers stick together represents, for many Turkish immigrants, a response to the “ethnic discrimination” encountered locally.