MY dad enjoyed football – Sportscene and Scotsport were often on the telly – but I didn’t pay much attention to it until about Primary 5, when suddenly the boys at my school in Falkirk started playing every lunchtime and you were expected to join in and before you knew it you were enjoying it. At that point, I didn’t support a team but I can remember the exact moment when that all changed.

It was 1986, I was in Primary 6 and my classmates and I were queuing up to go into our classroom. All the boys were talking about Graeme Souness – he’d just joined Rangers as a player-manager and that was big news. I didn’t know much at all about Rangers or even football at that time, although I’d heard Souness’s name because he was the Scotland captain. I could tell how excited all my pals were about Souness signing, though, and so I was quite quickly caught up in it.

I remember watching the Skol Cup final in 1986 – it was Celtic v Rangers and it was Souness’s first big test as player-manager. Rangers won 2-1 and it was the first time I’d ever watched a football match from beginning to end. From that point, Rangers were my team. I went to Ibrox quite a few times and I was there on my 12th birthday in 1987, in the old terracing, when Terry Butcher broke his leg against Aberdeen. I was also at Davie Cooper’s testimonial because he was my favourite player, by far. I sometimes wonder why I liked him above all others and I think it was because I was quite a creative child and Davie Cooper made football look like art.

He was like a magician on the park and could do things that nobody else could do. At school I played football most days and after school most nights and I tried joining a boys’ club but I wasn’t cut out for it. You’re playing alongside lads who want to become professionals and it suddenly becomes very serious. I didn’t have the competitive edge. The fun went out of it for me.

When I began to get older, I got more into films, music and books and football just became less appealing. This was in the nineties, around the same time the game became very corporate as well. And the older you get, the more aware you become of some of the nonsense that surrounds the Old Firm and I just wasn’t into all that. I never stopped being fascinated by Rangers, though – partly because my best mates from Falkirk were still big Bluenoses – and once I became a writer I started documenting the world that I came from, and that inevitably included football.

That said, I’ve been writing about Rangers since I was at primary school. I used to write poems in Scots about my favourite players; they were absolutely rubbish – obviously, because I was 10 – and I remember one I wrote about Ally McCoist. The only line I can remember is: “Ally, his tousled hair blawin in the wind.” I can’t remember the rest of it, thank goodness. But it’s interesting that the seeds of some of my future work were there in my childhood scribblings.

If you’re writing about Scottish, working-class men, it’s very hard to avoid football, so I just try to represent that as faithfully as I can. My fourth novel Pack Men is set on the day of the UEFA Cup final in 2008 and while it’s primarily about friendships, it’s set against the backdrop of the Rangers invasion of Manchester. I also co-edited a collection of essays called Born Under a Union Flag: Rangers, Britain and Scottish Independence which featured half a dozen Rangers fans who were voting Yes and half a dozen who were voting No, to explore how their politics were influenced (or not) by Rangers.

A few years ago, I began working on a play about Graeme Souness. I’ve always been fascinated by him as a character because he was so incredibly driven. After conquering Europe as captain of Liverpool, he transformed the entire Scottish game. I’d been working away on the play and then a new producer became involved and the first thing she asked was: ‘So what does Souness himself think about it?’

I’d no idea but realised I had to speak to him. I put out some enquiries, thinking I’d be lucky to get his agent’s number, then I got an email from a contact of mine with Souness’s mobile number in it and the words ‘He’s awaiting your call.’ That was all it said! I remember the feeling when the phone was ringing – I was absolutely bricking it, phoning up my childhood hero. When I introduced myself he said, ‘I know who you are’. It felt like an audience with The Godfather or something. He mainly just wanted to find out if I was going to do a hatchet job on him, which I’m not. I’m exploring the complexities of his life and legacy. We’re still trying to raise the funding so the play will come out sometime in the future, and he said he’s interested to see the final result.

My connection to sport is almost exclusively confined to football, although I did watch Andy Murray win his first Wimbledon title in 2013, even if I barely even knew the rules. My son is only 18 months old, so he’s still too young to be interested in football but I’d like to encourage him to support his local team, St Mirren. He might not be too keen, but he was born in Paisley, so I’ll pitch it to him that way