Politics, division and betrayal: the impact of the Webb Ellis myth

In little more than six weeks’ time, one team will emerge victorious in the 2023 Rugby World Cup final. Their captain will take centre stage at Paris’s Stade de France and lift the Webb Ellis Cup. The trophy is named in honour of William Webb Ellis, a schoolboy who, exactly 200 years ago, ran with the ball in his hands during a football match at Rugby School and so began the game of rugby. Except he didn’t invent rugby. The name of the World Cup trophy is based on a myth, and even worse, a myth in the deepest sense of the word. Not just untrue, but impossible.

Because the game of rugby did not emerge from what we today call “football”, or association football to give it its full title. If anything, it was the other way around. In 1823 “football” meant any game between two teams trying to propel a ball to a goal by hands or feet - and more often than not, players used both.

The rules of association football were not agreed until 40 years later, in 1863. Rugby football is no more the child of association football than Cain was the son of Abel. Yet the Ellis story is today known by millions, even those with no interest in sport. Ellis himself would have been baffled by the claim that he “created” rugby. He had died four years before he was named as the inventor of it in 1876. The Ellis myth only gained traction because it was politically useful at this crucial turning point in rugby’s history.

In the 1890s, clubs from industrial northern England campaigned for players to receive “broken-time” payments to compensate them for taking time off from their industrial jobs to play rugby. Rugby’s leaders, who were largely former public schoolboys, argued payments for play were a betrayal of the amateur ethos.

Unwilling to follow football’s example and allow player payments, rugby’s leaders refused to compromise and the war culminated in the split between union and league in 1895. That was also the year Rugby School’s Old Rugbeian Society confirmed Ellis as the game’s founder. It organised an inquiry but found no evidence to prove the case. But in rugby’s febrile atmosphere, the story seemed to prove the game belonged to the middle classes, not the miners, dockers and factory workers who dominated the sport in northern England.

So the Ellis myth is really not about rugby breaking free from football in 1823, but how rugby union defined itself in opposition to rugby league’s breakaway in 1895. Rugby union is not the only sport that feels the need for an origin story. Across the Atlantic, baseball’s creation myth claims it was singlehandedly invented in Cooperstown in upstate New York by the American war hero Abner Doubleday in 1839.

“Sports crave origin myths. They want to be more meaningful than simply chasing a ball around a field.”

Baseball’s myth was designed to confirm it was the true American sport, separate and distinct from British games. Being American became the central feature of baseball’s early marketing strategy. The truth is that sports crave origin myths to justify themselves. When sports represent nations and national cultures, they want to be seen as something more meaningful than simply chasing a ball around a field. It’s here that sporting myths - superficially harmless at one level - can pose a deeper moral problem.

Rugby union’s Ellis myth anchored the sport’s foundations on the school playing field and subtly helped the game to resist its evolution into a professional sport. For decades, it was administered as if it were still a schoolboys’ game which had almost accidentally become a sport played by highly trained adults in front of huge crowds. Promoting beliefs for which there is no proof can also foster a culture of denial of reality.

Clinging to a mythical past and failing to acknowledge reality brings its own risks, which has contributed to the concussion crisis which has become an existential threat to rugby’s future. The William Webb Ellis myth also had one other unintended consequence for rugby. By suggesting Ellis was playing association football when he ran with the ball, the story implied that the round-ball game was the original and authentic code of football. The creation of the Ellis myth ultimately helped football more than it did rugby.

Which just goes to show: be careful what you invent.