ABSTRACT
Soccer fan cultures around the world are renowned for their potential to bring people together and produce a positive sense of collective identity. Paradoxically, their potential to function as a public arena for the expression of racism has become equally notorious. At first glance, some recent statistics seem to suggest that this notoriety is increasingly unjustified. In the Netherlands, for example, only 2.2 per cent of all reports of racist incidents made to the official anti-discrimination agencies were related to soccer and other forms of ‘sports and recreation’.[ 1 ]
