Public spaces can have a hugely positive impact on community life. The civic virtues of, say, a youth club are undeniable and self-evident – and the history of urban sociology is full of wonderful work on the value of food markets (Anderson, 2011), busy streets (Jacobs, 1961), and libraries (Klinenberg, 2018). But sports facilities – and the lively scenes they support – remain an often overlooked and underappreciated area of public life – and thus an area ripe for research.
My latest research paper ‘Practicing community and sociality in public’ in the journal Social & Cultural Geography tells the story of my year-long ethnography of an amateur football team at the Hackney Marshes in London. It shares the highs and lows of a very ordinary amateur football team – from the euphoria of scoring a goal, through to the drudgery of losing 11-0. The paper discusses how the practice of playing football as a team can, in all sorts of ways, be understood as ‘practicing community’.
Football building relationships and kinship
What I mean by this is that, when I was following the team, I was struck by the everyday friendship and care between teammates. From checking in on how people were feeling after a game, to the post-match debrief at the local pub, through to physically cooperating to achieve a shared task. The team’s ability to endure even the most challenging of times (yes, particularly the 11-0 loss), was a testament to the strength and depth of the relationships that were built and sustained. These relationships are not dissimilar to the kinship that The Young Foundation’s founder, Michael Young, wrote about almost 70 years ago.
One of the reasons sports scenes are so interesting to study is that they build social connection, practices of care, and relations of trust almost by accident. The Hackney Marshes team I followed did not set out to be a community. They set out to create a space where people of varying ability could play football to the highest level they could in their evenings and weekends. The team commits to turning up to a field in East London through the wind rain and snow because playing football is fun.
Amateur sport as an accessible route to ‘community’
This is one of the critical reasons why studying amateur sport and fitness is important. For many people, it is an accessible way of taking part in community. Encouraging people to become ‘community members’ is a tough ask. What ‘community’? Where? And how? But asking people to take part in an activity of shared interest – running together, dancing together, doing yoga together, playing football together – is an easy way to slowly build local connections.
Community is not only a noun – a way to describe a group of people – but a verb. It’s the practices of sharing activity and language. In this way, it is easy to understand why sports can so valuably create the conditions for communities thrive.
This new paper shares an in-depth look at one specific team in one specific place. However, it is a story that resonates across our wider place-based work at The Young Foundation. From working in Hackney to support their Sport England local delivery pilot learning, through tackling physical inequalities across the capital with London Sport, and exploring local systems and what matters to residents in Cornwall, we are thinking a lot about the connections between communities and sport. Central to that is exploring how to create local conditions that support all people to take part in sports and fitness activities.
Of course, the health and wellbeing benefits of sport are widely known – but the contribution that sport can make to social connection and community life is less understood. If we want to create neighbourhoods that are healthy, engaging, and welcoming places to live, then understanding the role amateur sport can play in creating community is an important area for future research.
To hear more about connecting communities, sport and physical activity, contact jack.layton@icstudies.org.uk
The first 50 people to use this link will be able to download a free copy of the research paper.
Photo credit: Simon, London Less Travelled
Community Community wellbeing Health & wellbeing community football sport Posted on: 20 February 2025 Authors: Jack Layton,