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This paper explores the role of recreational sport as a means and marker of social integration by analysing the lived experiences of Somali people from refugee backgrounds with sport.Drawing on a three-year multi-sided ethnography, the paper examines the extent to and ways in which participation in sport contributes to Somali Australians' bonding, bridging and linking social capital. It is shown how social bonds and bridges developed in the sports context assist in the (re)building of community networks that have been eroded by war and displacement. Sport's contribution to social capital should however be neither over-stated nor over-generalised. Bridging social capital in sport is relatively weak and few bridges are established between Somalis and the host community. Negative social encounters such as discrimination and aggression can highlight and reinforce group boundaries. Access to and use of linking social capital is also unequally distributed across gender, age, ethnic and socioeconomic lines.

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This article examines community sport as a site where refugee youth negotiate belonging, which is conceptualised as a dynamic dialectic of 'seeking' and 'granting'. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork among Somali Australian youth at community football (soccer) clubs in Melbourne, the article identifies the kinds of belonging that are constructed by refugee youth in community sport, the social processes that facilitate or impede these belongings, and the forms of boundary work involved. The belonging negotiated by Somali Australian youth in community sports clubs is multi-layered, dynamic and situational, and involves multiple boundary shifts. It operates at varying scales of experience from the sports team and local community to the transnational. The article shows that while social boundaries such as clan, team and locality are porous, other boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, notably gender, ethnicity and religion, tend to be more stable and more difficult to cross for Somali Australian youth in community football clubs.