Ethnicity as an Exercise in Sport: European Immigrants, Soccer Fandom, and the Making of Canadian Multiculturalism, 1945–1979

Abstract

Ethnic sport offers an important and understudied lens into how newcomers – a key population on the social peripheries – negotiate their entry into host societies. Canada was among the top countries to receive European migrants after the Second World War. Soccer participation and fandom were a gateway in their resettlement and an axis for community formation, identity expression, economic advancement, and personal pleasure. This paper explores what four decades of ethnic soccer on the peripheries of post-war Toronto reveals about the local organization of immigrant life and the European newcomer’s mediated entry into English Canada. It demonstrates that Toronto soccer fans were sufficient in number and electoral voice to transform the urban politics of leisure and organization of social diversity, even as their leisure activities were still heavily contained by host institutions. Paradoxically, soccer’s straightjacketed role in Toronto as an ethnic social adhesive and platform for identity expression rendered it largely irrelevant to the general, more settled population, while its capacity to articulate ethnic differences made it a force and symbol of English Canada’s re-imagination as a multicultural society in the 1970s.