Amid increasingly polarized political and public debate about migration, there remains a broad consensus that sports can transcend social tensions and facilitate integration. Studies have even suggested that prominent foreign-born sports figures—such as Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah in the United Kingdom, Syrian-born swimmer Yusra Mardini in Germany, and Japanese baseball player Shohei Ohtani in the United States—may influence the publics in the countries where they play to be more receptive toward migrants.

Beside the spotlight surrounding elite athletes, countries including Australia, Canada, and several in Western and Northern Europe have, since the late 1990s and early 2000s, introduced national policies to increase immigrants’ participation in sports as a pathway to integration. While nations such as the Netherlands have focused on funding and supporting local-level programs, others (including Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, and Sweden) have embedded sport-based integration goals within pre-existing national sports or migration strategies.

However, narratives that present sports as inherent facilitators of integration frequently overlook the many different understandings of what integration means, how it should be achieved, and how sports are used within those frameworks. Researchers have identified three main policy approaches to integration: the assimilationist approach, which emphasizes cultural uniformity and expects migrants to adopt the host society’s values and norms; the multiculturalist approach, which supports the coexistence of diverse cultural practices; and the interculturalist approach, which stresses mutual adaptation and co-creation of shared civic values between migrants and the host society. These approaches can shift over time and overlap significantly when translated into policies, including those focused on sports and physical activity.

This article provides an overview of government- and community-led sports programs as tools for migrant integration, focusing on the frameworks that undergird various approaches and how they envision sports to shape relations between host societies and newcomers.

A Short History of Sports as a Pro-Social Policy Tool

While the idea of sports as a tool for social and moral improvement is not new, a clear moment of convergence between this narrative and shifting social and welfare policies can be traced to the late 1980s in advanced liberal economies of the Global North. A widely cited example is Midnight Basketball in the United States. Launched in the late 1980s, this network of community programs targeted predominantly Black teenagers and young men in urban areas affected by economic recession, welfare retrenchment, crime, and drug use. The programs offered late-night basketball games and life-skills workshops, aiming to engage at-risk youth during peak hours for criminal activity, promote individual development, and reduce crime. Midnight Basketball programs have continued in various forms with mixed success, and have often been described as a highly effective advertisement for a wider policy shift emphasizing prevention and targeted skills development—particularly among marginalized groups—over broader, costlier structural welfare policies.

Midnight Basketball also became a model for community sports organizations, which had been struggling with municipal budget cuts. Sports initiatives could now attract funding from a wider array of government departments and private donors, thanks to their perceived cost-effective role in reducing social ills such as obesity, school dropout, and crime, as well as enhancing skills development and social mobility.

Starting in the late 1990s, similar programming appeared across Western and Northern Europe, marking a policy transition from developing sports within communities to developing communities through sports. This shift fostered a wide array of interventions focused on the (re)socialization and integration of groups including migrants, and particularly young men. More recently, efforts have been made to engage participants as young as 10, as well as women and girls. Australia and Canada followed similar trajectories, highlighting the socioeconomic benefits of sports for inner-city youth, migrants, and Indigenous communities.

However, research on projects using sports for social good has highlighted a recurring risk: the conflation of social problems with the identities of the groups being targeted. For example, critiques of Midnight Basketball noted that it unintentionally reinforced racial stereotypes, portraying young Black men as inherently either athletically gifted or prone to criminality. Comparable issues were identified in similar initiatives in Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, which often framed recipients as both the source and the solution to the social challenges they faced, focusing narrowly on individual transformation.

Sports-linked employability programs in countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, which partnered with soccer teams to deliver sports and skills-development workshops for young men and women, echoed this pattern. These initiatives framed social change primarily through individual behavioral shifts, reinforcing a narrative in which structural problems were reduced to personal shortcomings. As a result, policymakers have often declined to address systemic causes and instead supported policies aimed only at those individuals perceived as capable of self-improvement using the limited resources available.

An (Un)Easy Fix? Sports and Migrant Integration

As this experience suggests, sports-related policy can be used ambivalently—and at times controversially—to both reflect and enact different understandings of migrants’ integration. Two emblematic cases illustrate this tension: France’s 2022 ban on Islamic-appropriate, full-body swimwear (“burkinis”) at public pools and beaches, and the 2017 decision in Aarhus, Denmark, to end women-only swimming sessions, which had been attended primarily by migrant and second-generation Muslims.

Although these cases did not arise from sports initiatives explicitly designed to promote integration, they are highly relevant. In both, policies regulating access to physical activities imposed specific visions of integration; French officials claimed burkinis conflicted with the national value of secularism, while Danish authorities argued that “special programs are harmful and not beneficial for integration,” as academics Verena Lenneis and Sine Agergaard described. These rationales reflected an assimilationist understanding of integration which requires that immigrant communities adopt the dominant cultural norms, viewing cultural or religious differences—including those expressed through sports—as barriers to successful integration.

As these cases suggest, sports policies aiming to empower or integrate immigrants and their families can often rely on problematic assumptions that their cultural background is the primary barrier to integration, and that they ought to conform to dominant, Western-centric models of sports and women’s emancipation. This approach reinforces a deficit-based framing, portraying newcomers as lacking skills or cultural openness, rather than as active agents navigating complex systems.

Multiculturalist Approaches in Transition  

The Danish example also signals a broader trend of countries with histories of multiculturalist integration policies—including Australia and Sweden—shifting toward de facto assimilationist approaches in sport and social policy. Often, this has been done under the banner of civic integration. In Australia, research since the early 2000s has shown that young resettled refugees often prefer joining sports teams comprised of members of their same ethnic group. Far from hindering integration, evidence shows these teams help maintain cultural and social ties while supporting settlement in a new society. However, Australian policy has typically viewed these kinds of ethnocentric clubs as problematically promoting segregation and ethnic tensions. As the academic Richard Wazana noted, “soccer had to be ‘de-ethnicized’ before it could be proclaimed by the national soccer league as an expression of Australian multiculturalism.”

The debate on whether ethnocultural clubs constitute barriers to or facilitators of integration continues to shape policy in various countries. International evidence suggests that multicultural events such as the Amsterdam World Cup (in the Netherlands) and the Community Cup (in Ottawa, Canada), which allow for teams built around ethnic and/or cultural identities, do not fuel segregation and social tensions, as assimilationist frameworks often assume. Still, multicultural approaches to sport and integration are not without limitations. Studies examining the above mentioned and other events consistently underline that while multicultural sports initiatives aim to celebrate diversity, they often over-rely on community gatekeepers and fail to account for intra-community diversity. As a result, initiatives promoting multicultural integration may fail to acknowledge and engage with the hybridity, change, and cultural negotiation that characterize both migrant communities and host societies.

Clear Benefits—and Limitations

Importantly, evidence shows that opportunities to engage in sports and physical activities can offer potential benefits for newcomers. Participation in sports and physical activity initiatives can support well-being, skill development, and social connections. In some instances, it can even open pathways to education and employment. However, access to these potential benefits is often shaped by intersecting factors, including economic barriers, restricted civic rights, and discrimination based on sexuality, gender, religion, racialization/ethnicity, and disability. In other words, a closer examination of various programs reveals that the positive impact of sports and physical activity tends to depend on meeting pre-existing inclusion criteria, rather than being universally accessible.

Overall, and across diverse policy contexts, sports’ integrative potential operates unevenly at individual, group, and institutional levels, and remains shaped by top-down definitions of integration which frequently fail to recognize migrants’ identities or the diversity within migrant communities. Furthermore, policies often treat migrants as a monolithic group and promote participation through one-size-fits-all programs that overlook gendered realities of migration and participation in sports.

However, assimilationist and multiculturalist perspectives are not the only lenses through which sport is mobilized to support migrant integration and belonging. Over the past two decades, separate but overlapping factors—including increasingly restrictive immigration policies and austerity cuts across several countries in the Global North—have contributed to the emergence of a growing number of grassroots and locally driven initiatives. The starting points for these initiatives have often been neither multiculturalist nor assimilationist frameworks, but in many cases the need for newcomer and established residents alike to have opportunities to play in specific local settings. In so doing, these often-small-scale projects have offered alternative practices and posed compelling questions to established visions of integration and their translation in sports settings.

Reframing Integration in and through Sport: Emerging Approaches

Since the 2010s, increasing border restrictions and shrinking asylum access in several countries have led to a rise in local migrant-focused sports initiatives that do not fit neatly within the previously discussed paradigms of integration. Many initiatives have emerged across cities in Europe, North America, and Oceania through relatively small-scale projects in schools, cultural associations, and youth centers, drawing inspiration from intercultural and activist approaches.

These interculturalist strategies differ from both assimilationist and multiculturalist models in three important ways: They avoid deficit-based understandings of migrants as needing to acculturate to integrate successfully; they attempt not to homogenize cultural differences; and they embrace co-design processes that draw on migrants’ own experiences, capabilities, and perspectives. This approach is considered more responsive to diversity than assimilationism, while also avoiding the multiculturalist tendency to treat cultural groups as fixed. Intercultural approaches often underpin policies developed at the local level—particularly in super-diverse urban areas such as Melbourne, Milan, and Montreal—where flexibility and community engagement help shape sports programs that are inclusive to both newcomers and long-term residents across genders.

Although these initiatives remain often small in scale, they have produced notable policies. Some projects have promoted a broader use of informal sports and physical activities—such as recreational cycling, dance, or parkour—that hold significance for many (often young) people, both with and without migrant backgrounds, and which often occur outside traditional sports infrastructures (such as in parks, playgrounds, and town squares). These kinds of efforts encourage policymakers to reconsider dominant approaches to sports and integration, which often prioritize team sports and performance-oriented events (including multicultural leagues) or else assume that adopting mainstream sporting norms is equivalent to integration.

Other programs have retained a focus on popular team sports while centering athletes and coaches with migrant backgrounds as educational leaders and policy co-creators. In Melbourne, for example, the community soccer program Football Empowerment was co-designed with African-Australian coaches (both male and female) and demonstrates how sports leaders with firsthand experience of migration, racism, sexism, and their intersecting effects could play a central role in building inclusive spaces of belonging, fostering hyphenated identities, and promoting meaningful social participation.

Mobilizing similar principles, grassroots groups across several European countries (including Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom) have drawn on explicitly anti-racist and pro-LGBTQI+ values to offer a broad range of sports, leisure, and physical activity opportunities for asylum seekers and other migrants, while also welcoming participation from the wider community. These groups, often informed by the historical barriers to sports for women and ethnic and sexual minorities, have helped create safe and inclusive initiatives that reflect the specific needs of migrants’ diverse trajectories and identities.

Departing significantly from conventional sports-and-integration programs, many of these kinds of initiatives have also challenged the binary of beneficiaries and providers, or of guests and hosts. For instance, newcomers have co-designed and implemented several activities delivered by the Yoga and Sport with Refugees project, which offers a range of classes and programs in cities in France and Greece and is also open to local participants. These types of efforts create spaces that complicate one-way and top-down integration approaches and narratives.

In contrast to dominant narratives that frame immigration as a burden or threat to social cohesion, grassroots initiatives—such as locally organized soccer, table tennis, running, and cycling programs—have addressed shared needs and interests of different residents in local areas, migrant and native-born alike, especially amid financial cuts to public services, including community and sports centers. By creating opportunities where sports are not used merely to either acculturate migrants or celebrate a host society’s cultural diversity, these emerging initiatives pose questions and alternatives to established understandings of what integration is and how it can be achieved. While these kinds of initiatives are currently small in scale, they offer valuable insights and models for sporting and community organizations as well as policymakers.

Lessons from Experiences

Sports do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by broader historical, sociocultural, economic, and political forces—and, in turn, contribute to shape how people experience and address these forces, and relate to one another.

Physical activities have been used in different ways to address challenges related to migration, sometimes as national policy tools and other times as means of reimagining belonging, place, and identity from the grassroots up. On one hand, top-down sports programming has followed broader shifts in welfare and social policy, which increasingly emphasize individual responsibility over structural support. On the other, bottom-up initiatives have drawn on longstanding—though often marginalized—understandings of active physicality as a domain where the pursuit of social justice can meet the shared enjoyment of movement.

Understanding these trends allows policymakers and the public to move beyond slogans such as sports as a “universal language” and instead learn from what has (and has not) worked—and for whom—across different approaches.

Four key lessons emerge. First, it is clear that sports are not a silver bullet. While they can play a role in migrant inclusion and integration, publics and policymakers must critically examine how sports opportunities are designed, for whom, and under what aims, premises, and conditions.

Secondly, one-size-fits-all approaches typically fall short. While national policies have broad reach, they often treat migrants as a homogeneous group, overlooking diverse experiences across gender, religion, race, disability, and migration pathways that shape people’s engagement with both receiving societies and sporting domains.

Thirdly, deficit framing is limiting. Many initiatives focus on “correcting” migrants’ perceived deficiencies, rather than building on their capacities, interests, and experiences. Co-designing programs with migrants can help avoid these pitfalls and address barriers—and seize potential opportunities—that might be invisible for some but tangible for others.

Finally, small-scale, grassroots initiatives matter. Community-based and activist-led sports programs may be modest and mired by several challenges and limitations, but they have been demonstrated to offer often innovative, practical, and context-sensitive approaches that are deeply attuned to local realities and challenges.

Paying attention to the far-from-universal uses and perspectives on sports, migration, and integration can help policymakers and community groups alike illuminate what is missing from glossy accounts of sports’ unifying potential—and from polarizing narratives about migration and migrants. With these considerations in mind, the key issue seems to be less about determining whether sports can integrate migrants once and for all. Rather, what is crucial is recognizing that the ways in which policymakers and practitioners design, manage, and deliver sports and physical activity initiatives can contribute to shape how newcomers and established communities alike perceive, relate to, and live with each other.

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