Typology of practices

The review of the different good practices guides and platforms shows a remarkable variety of activities provided by grassroots actors who have engaged in projects aiming at the inclusion and/or integration of migrants with the help of sport. A very large part of them focuses on football.

In order to have a more systematic overview, it makes sense to establish a tentative “typology” of practices that may be drawn from these many examples. In the graph below, the actions implemented by football clubs and sport associations have been grouped in six major categories:

The fundamental and most important action remains, of course, the “classical” football activity, which, after all, is the reason of being of football clubs. All other actions are “grafted” on this basic link established between civil society actors and newly arrived migrants.

While there are many commonalities across Europe, especially in terms of motivations and engagement by sport civil society actors, it is important to realise that every single type of initiative included in the above graph are

strongly impacted by the national context and discursive environment;
and at one point confronted with obstacles and barriers of different kinds.

These are addressed in the national contexts section.