Recently, historians have begun to illuminate further the role that ethnicity played in integrating immigrants into mining societies. Ethnicity, they show, shaped foreign−native relations in complex ways. Migrant culture and local norms both affected the assimilation process. This essay, focusing on France’s premiere coalfield of Pas-de-Calais during the 1920s, a period of mass influx of Polish laborers, explores employers’ often underappreciated influence over inter-ethnic relations, and it reveals the far-reaching effects of managerial policies. Management’s ethnic paternalism influenced, though often unintentionally, relations between Poles and French miners and officials. Employer strategies to manage Poles led natives to see themselves as distinct from and even superior to immigrants. Beyond the workplace, employers used ethnic notions to attract and control Poles, yet in doing so they highlighted the dissimilarities between Poles and Frenchmen. Ultimately, coal companies reinforced foreigners’ isolation from local society and roused the suspicions of officials, who strictly policed the Polish community.

Football is often thought to have helped erase differences between natives and migrants in mining communities and to have helped in building a homogeneous class identity. Others have described this idea as a myth. Under closer scrutiny, however, relations between migrants and football are more complex than commonly thought. This article will elaborate on these complex relations by analysing the case of the coalfield in the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais during the twentieth century. Migrant workers were employed there from an early date: first, from the 1920s, Poles; later on other migrants, especially of Moroccan and Algerian descent. Migrants played an important role in the development of football in this region. This article looks at the influence of football on relations between migrants and other miners. More generally, it aims to show how sport was incorporated into the industrial mining world, both in employers’ policies and in the mining community.

Sport, and football in particular, is described in socio-political discourse as an effective way to integrate immigrants. This thesis will be tested by means of a case study examining Polish migration to the mining areas of the Ruhr from the 1870s. It will be shown that, up until World War I, the sport participated in by Polish miners served, in contrast, as a means of nationalization, ethnicizing, and as an aid to furthering Polish ethnic identity. Only during the Weimar Republic were football clubs in the Ruhr actually used as a vehicle for integration and assimilation for males among the Polish minority. After World War II, memories of these footballers from among the Polish minority were either repressed or reduced to folklore. Based on this historical case study, sport appears in principle to be ambivalent between its ability to form “we” groups and the building of bridges between nationalities.