The ‘Beautiful Game’ and the New African Diaspora: Soccer, Sporting Cultures, and Cultural Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the increasing migration of contemporary Black Africans to Canada, their diverse experiences in sport—both within their diasporic communities and in broader Canadian society—remain significantly underexplored in the sociology of sport. This study critically examines the role of soccer and its associated forms of sociality in the migration experiences of Black immigrant men from continental Africa—members of the new African diaspora—who as members of the Black Continental African Soccer Club (BCASC), participate in a 35+ recreational soccer league in a Western Canadian city. Drawing on findings from a multi-year ethnographic study between September 2020 – August 2024, and situated at the intersections of Critical Race Theory, Diaspora Studies, and Physical Cultural Studies, this research explores how soccer operates as a site of cultural negotiation, identity formation, and resistance. It highlights how team members navigate a racialized hierarchy that privileges whiteness, and how they confront both overt and subtle forms of racism on and off the pitch. These experiences are often compounded by the burdensome and re-traumatizing process of having to "prove" racism to institutional authorities who are frequently unwilling or ill-equipped to recognize it. The analysis also explores the BCASC as a Black sporting institution that serves both as a symbolic marker of collective Black identity and a platform for its expression. The club becomes a space for articulating oppositional identities that resist dominant norms and practices, while also offering a sense of cultural belonging and "home" through nostalgic connections to the African continent. Soccer thus emerges as a powerful medium through which players challenge exclusionary narratives of (un)belonging and assert their presence within Canadian society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".