Voluntary organizations in several European countries have developed numerous sports programs following the refugee ‘reception crisis’. In a ten years span, these programs have gone from being rare, original and innovative to being relatively widespread practices whose values are widely recognized by national and European institutions. The first comparative research on the policy objectives and impact of these sport programs highlighted the diversity of these types of organizations and their objectives. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in French and German sports association, this article examines the ways in which refugees experience these sports programs. The results show that refugees negotiate and redefine political demands for integration through the expression of emotions of pleasure in sporting activities. The paper concludes that sport offers an opportunity to reconfigure identity and belonging beyond the refugee label, outside of institutional and governmental expectations.