How Does Sport Enhance Social Mobility?

Spaaij’s book is well-written as he is able to detail clearly to the readers the processes of how each type of capital (social, cultural and economic) is developed through sport participation and how they enhance social mobility. I also like how Spaaij is a reflective researcher who critically analyses his arguments (Holloway & Biley, 2011). Although he argues that sport can enhance social mobility, he also acknowledges that 1) sport can simultaneously create barriers and inequalities that prevent some from moving up the social ladder and 2) whether sport can promote social mobility or not is contingent on social contexts as there may be structural constraints that hinder such effect of sport, for example, racial discrimination in labour market

While his comparative analysis across these programs are good, he could also consider analysing one or two additional programs that use other sports such as ‘The First Tee’ (TFT), which is a very popular international sport-for-development program that uses golf to impart educational lessons and skills to economically disadvantaged youth who desire to play golf (TFT, 2016). By doing so, the analysis of sport effects on social mobility is not restricted to across countries only but also across different sports themselves, which is important to analyse because different sports may have different effects on social mobility (Nixon, 1976). Bourdieu (1978) noted that team sports such as football are more associated with working class and hence have fewer high status resources whereas bourgeois sports such as golf are “mere pretexts for select encounters which enable the accumulation of high-quality social capital” (p. 839). Consequently, participation in bourgeois-sport programs like TFT is arguably better able to generate for disadvantaged youth sustainable upward social mobility as “bourgeois sports are more endowed with better capitals needed for social advancement than team sports” (Spaaij, 2011, p. 179), such as football in NCFL. For example, they will be more exposed to higher-status people during golf events and may get high quality job information and opportunities that they otherwise will not have access to (Black Enterprise, 1992; Cullen, 2008). Thus, as different sports have different effects on social mobility, an exploration of other non-football programs is needed to enrich our understanding of the link between sport and social