ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a critical understanding of the under-representation of British Asian players from the professional game. It discusses ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ oral testimonies to critically investigate exclusionary barriers to participation. The chapter explores the extent to which the white racial frame has impacted on British Asian football experiences and examines how the collective memories and histories have worked to protect the dominant groups’ position of power leading to the continued alienation of British Asian groups. It describes how meritocratic thinking can hinder action and argues how the racial hierarchy can be destabilised. British Asian communities and white British communities have traditionally played ‘parallel’ football. There has been a lack of contact and relationships between clubs in predominantly British Asian locales and professional, and semi-professional, clubs. The Western imagination arguably understands the British Asian ‘culture’ as being ‘inexorably related to the Indian subcontinent’ and ‘traditional rather than modern’.