Social inclusion and volunteering in sports clubs in Europe

This publication is an introduction to the project Social Inclusion and Volunteering in Sports Clubs in Europe (SIVSCE). The idea to build up a European research project on sports clubs was born in the “Sport Organisation Research Network” (SORN), an initiative taken in context to the “European Association for Sociology of Sport” (EASS). The first initiative of the network was to publish the book “Sports clubs in Europe. A cross-national comparative perspective (Breuer et all, 2015). Experts from ten European countries take part in the SIVSCE-project. They were all recruited from within the SORN-network and were all authors to chapters in the book on sports clubs in Europe. The project is implemented over a three year period in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The project seeks to collect, analyse and discuss comparable knowledge across ten European countries, convert it into concrete suggestions for action, and disseminate this knowledge to politicians, sports professionals and sports volunteers in Europe. By doing this, the project aims to promote social inclusion and volunteering in European sports clubs.