HIVE SPORT LAB
Publications
HER001B
There Was Never One Game
Football Origins Collection — Part I
FINAL PROOF STAGE
Developed alongside the live lecture of the same name, There Was Never One Game begins with a deceptively simple question:
Was there ever really one game called football?
Rather than retelling the familiar story of football's origins, the book explores a different possibility: that football did not begin as one game before dividing into many, but as many different games that gradually came to be recognised as separate sports.
Along the way, it challenges assumptions about invention, codification and the idea of a single point of origin, asking whether football is better understood as an evolving human system than a single historical invention.
As the first part of the Football Origins Collection, the book uses football as its lens to explore something much broader: how people create, adapt and reshape the systems they live within. Through agreement and disagreement, compromise, experimentation and local adaptation, seemingly fixed traditions emerge over time.
Whether experienced through the live lecture or the accompanying book, the aim is the same: not simply to tell a different story of football, but to leave you asking different questions.
Coming soon on Amazon.
HER002B
Codifying Chaos
Football Origins Collection — Part II
IN DRAFT — COMING SOON
Developed alongside the live lecture of the same name, Codifying Chaos begins with a deceptively simple question:
If there was never one game, how did one version come to define the game we recognise today?
Rather than treating codification as a straightforward act of organisation, the book explores it as a process of negotiation, compromise and choice. It asks why rules became necessary, who had the authority to write them, and what was gained—and quietly lost—when local customs gave way to shared agreement.
As the second part of the Football Origins Collection, Codifying Chaos uses football to explore a broader question: how do people create agreement when existing systems no longer work? It examines how rules do more than organise behaviour—they shape possibility. They influence not only how a game is played, but what the game itself can become.
Whether experienced through the live lecture or the accompanying book, Codifying Chaos invites readers to look beyond the rulebook and consider the human decisions, negotiations and compromises that transformed one version of football into the foundation of the modern game.
