Next year, 2023, is the 200th anniversary of the date when William Webb Ellis allegedly picked up the ball and ran with it, and so invented the game of rugby.

As is now well-known - and as outlined in the very first episode of ‘Rugby Reloaded’ - this is a myth, part of the long and complex cultural cold war which split rugby in two. But rugby union is not the only sport with an invented origin story. Baseball has its legend of Abner Doubleday single-handed inventing the sport. And Aussie Rules football also promotes a creation myth that it was originally an Aboriginal game.

But. as this 2011 article - The Invention of Sporting Tradition: National Myths, Imperial Pasts and the Origins of Australian Rules Football - explains, the invention of origin stories is common to almost all sports, which create these myths to support the way the want to portray their sport and its role in society. Sometimes, as is the case with Aussie Rules, these stories sometimes change over time, as the sport or society themselves change.

As well as looking at the way in which Aussie Rules rewrote its own history, the article looks at how the process of inventing traditions worked in other sports, and draws some conclusions about why sports need creation myths. Feel free to use this link to download from here!