Sport holds deep significance in everyday life, in particular, offering transformative potential for marginalised communities. This case study explores the experiences of male Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) living and working in Singapore, mainly on temporary visas, and the significance of basketball to this community.

Basketball thrives as a popular leisure practice among migrant Filipino men - recreational basketball leagues and casual pick-up games have emerged as important sites to build migrant social infrastructures that enable these men to survive their precarity in Singapore. How are the constraints created by migration and citizenship regimes negotiated in the micro contexts of informal sport and urban everyday life?

Our findings show how they cultivate social infrastructures of care in an uncaring city-state that relies on their labour but is built for the enjoyment of the elite class. Infrastructures, in social and urban theory, is understood as the background technologies that scaffold urban life, intertwined with how inequalities are maintained but also challenged. Pick-up basketball and the spaces in which it is played by Filipino migrant workers generate ‘migrant social infrastructures’ that facilitate social connection, networks of care and trust, and as well ingenuity and resourcefulness.