The New Association

On the 13th of March, the Scottish Football Association - founded in 1873, the second oldest football association in the world - voted to dissolve itself. The motion passed in eleven minutes. The press statement took forty seconds to read.

What came after would take considerably longer.

David Strathdee left Scotland seventeen years ago in the back of a taxi on a Tuesday morning, without knocking. He had a good life in Cheshire, a large house, no reason to go back. He had also been right about Scottish football for fifteen years while everyone called him a disgrace, and now someone from the government was on the phone telling him that being right was a qualification.

Caitlin Reid had stayed. She had been coming to Gartsherrie Park since she was six, her dad's hand around hers on the road in. She had built the supporters club because someone had to. She had read the dissolution letter four times and each time something in her tightened a little further.

They meet again at the locked gate of the ground where they both grew up - not by arrangement, just by the logic of people who know where their feet will take them when something is lost. What David is trying to build, in a room in Victoria Quay with a government that may or may not be serious, is something Scottish football has never had: an oversight body with real authority, and a seat at the table for people like Caitlin. What Caitlin is trying to decide is whether she trusts any of it. Including him.

The New Association Suspended is a novel about institutions and the people who outlast them. It is about what gets kept and what gets discarded.