ABSTRACT
Through targeted multisite ethnography and interviews with parents, players, and coaches, this chapter explores how race operates within youth soccer environments in the United States. The chapter identifies the existence of multiple racially and ethnically diverse spaces of youth soccer that many parents, players, and coaches appreciate and cherish. These diverse spaces of soccer quietly reproduce and affirm popular narratives of sport as a leading and progressive site of racial progress and inclusion. At the same time, it shows the ways in which racist ruptures occur within cosmopolitan spaces of youth soccer. Such ruptures happen through overt racist incidents and the persistence of biological racial discourse in everyday conversations about soccer. Due to this tension, the chapter argues that youth soccer is a contested racial field where exclusionary overt and subtle racist aggressions and essentialised racial discourse exist simultaneously with happy discourses of diversity, racial transcendence, and cosmopolitanism.
