Common Goals: Grassroots football as a catalyst of inclusion and participation for people seeking asylum

Football clubs are often at the heart of their communities. This makes them well-placed to act as catalysts for social inclusion and to provide a sense of belonging to refugees and people seeking asylum (Dukic et al., 2017). Furthermore, the relationship between local clubs and the neighbourhood spaces that they inhabit creates opportunities for the reclamation of urban space for inclusive sports activities.

Drawing on my PhD research in two Italian cities, this Fellowship will focus on improving policy and practice in relation to sport, space and inclusion.

In Italy and across Europe, hundreds of local football clubs aim to engage and include people from a forced migration background through projects such as Football Welcomes (led by Amnesty International) and FIRE (Football Including Refugees, funded by Erasmus+). Through a practitioner guide, multimedia website and programme of engagement, I will offer evidence-based recommendations for improving practice and making grassroots teams more effective at supporting refugees to feel connected to their new communities.

At a policy level, efforts will be focused on opportunities for mapping access to public spaces to encourage social inclusion through sport. This is a central priority of the Fare network (supported by the European Commission, UEFA and FIFA), and dissemination of my research findings through network building and a policy clinic will have potential to inform policy on this theme at both local authority and international NGO level.

A core challenge that the Fellowship seeks to address is the underrepresentation of people from forced migration backgrounds in leadership roles in football projects. Without this level of participation, there is the risk that these projects reproduce the idea of refugees as people in need and at the receiving end of the activists' care (Spaaij et al., 2019). A civic hackathon will bring together practitioners, policymakers, people with lived expertise and academics to generate co-created solutions to this challenge.

In addition to my existing research, a new photovoice project will provide insights on the role of grassroots football in creating senses of belonging to local spaces. Specifically, the project will engage young people from ethnic minority backgrounds who are involved in the local grassroots team, and ask them to photograph spaces in their neighbourhood where they feel at home. Participants will be fully involved in the development and implementation of the project. The photographs will be exhibited locally and on the project website, amplifying the voices of the participants and highlighting the potential for urban spaces to provide concrete forms of local belonging to categories of people excluded from the national imagination (Allon, 2013). The project will build on my research findings regarding football and "right to the city" - a concept advanced by Lefebvre (1996) to suggest that claims over urban spaces do not come from the recognition of formal citizenship, but from the inhabitance and everyday use of the space.

On a professional level, the Fellowship will help me to firmly establish my area of research expertise through dissemination to the academic community. Two REF-returnable journal articles will allow me to initiate a publications track record, while two conference papers will allow for network building and the opportunity to identify potential future collaborations.

I will also strengthen my skills in participatory and creative methodologies through delivering the photovoice project and undertaking training in GIS. This will support my career trajectory in engaged action research and allow me to develop a research proposal incorporating participatory community mapping; a method that will further cement my expertise in sport, space and inclusion.