Apparantly he spent last season with IFK Sundsvall in the fifth tier of swedish football where he scored an impressive 24 goals in 21 matches. The local media refers to him as "American/Liberian" in several articles. This appears to be his wikipedia page. He is now back in Sundsvall for a trial with newly promoted Allsvenskan club GIF Sundsvall according to this article published today. That would be quite an enormous jump in quality, but the clubs chief scout seems pretty optimistic as he comments: "If anyone know about Anthony it's us, and now that he's back in Sundsvall again we took the opportunity to have him train with us. He's a very good guy with good qualities, but it's now up to our coaching staff to assess him. But he's an exciting player. To start out he will be training for us this week."
You'll notice he has an American last name, not an "African" name, and might think the Liberian connection is weak. (I'm assuming that Liberian history is better known in the US than in Norway for reasons that will become apparent soon.) One of the "problems" in America before the Civil War was, OK, if we free the slaves, what do we do with them? Some Americans hatched the idea of, well, sending 'em back to Africa. That's how Liberia was founded. Its name comes from the word "liberty." Its capital, IIRC, is named after one of our presidents, James Monroe. So alot of Liberians have last names like Smith and Brown and Blair and so forth, because they are descended from freed slaves who were given passage back to Africa.
Liberian emigrants also included many "free people of color" from the U.S. Some Southern states were more anxious to get rid of them than their slaves because they lived in a shadowy area between slavery and freedom. The first president of the Republic of Liberia was Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free man of color from Petersburg, VA.
Yet, if that's his Wikipedia page, his name was originally "Sargbah Tarpeh" and he grew up in Philly. No mention of citizenship, though he came up through youth soccer in the US. At the very least, he is another US-trained player with international roots and a chance to play for a different national team.
The GIF Sundsvall manager said in an article today that he was surprised by Allison but that going directly to the first division might be too big of a step. The manager instead contacted Östersunds FK, a club in the third division who they have a cooperation with, and arranged for Allison to go and train with them.
It looks likely that Allison will remain at IFK Sundsvall as he didn't get signed by Östersund. The manager said that he was a good player and a nice guy but not the type of player that they were specifically looking for.
Anthony Allison moves up one division and signs for Härnösands FF in the swedish fourth tier. Interesting to see if he can maintain his high goalscoring ratio. I also noticed that he is listed as both liberian and american on transfermarkt, so I'm assuming that he does have dual citizenship.
I wouldn't assume Transfermarkt is correct, though they often are. I'll see if we can get an answer out of the club. James Teaway and Prince Somah at Härnösands FF are also Liberian, and their player Abdul Bangura may be a Sierra Leone native who played some college ball in the States. This appears to be a March match report in which he maybe scored... HFF och Älgarna möttes på tisdag kväll i en vänskapsmatch. Matchen slutade 1 - 0 till HFF efter det att Anthony Allison målade efter 24 minuters spel. HFF dominerade matchen totalt även om det unga Älgalaget gjorde en bra match. Effektiviteten hos HFF saknades helt, och trots minst ett 10-tal helt öppna mållägen lyckades HFF inte få in bollen mer än en gång i Älgamålet. Båda lagen bytte många spelare under matchtiden. Även om spelet fungerade ganska bra för HFF torde det bli en rejäl dos med avslutningar på kommande träningar. http://harnosandsff.se/
Anthony Allison and Abdul Bangura @ Härnösands FF According to the club, both Allison and Bangura are American citizens. As a result, I'll be adding them to the list. They are obviously excited to see how Allison's goalscoring record holds up and they see Bangura as one of their top defenders and a team leader. They will play in the same division (Division 2 Norrland) as Ryan Gracia's Bodens BK. More to come if I can get it. Mods, see above for potential thread title change?
From the looks of it Allison will have no problem continuing his scoring ways even though he moved up one division for this season. The first game of the season was postponed because of bad weather but in the second round he scored the game winning goal and in the latest game he scored the equalizer and created a penalty in Härnösands 3-1 win. Besides the goals he also seems to be creating loads of chances according to reports.
Allison scored two goals today in a 3-1 win which moved Härnösand up into first place and the only promotion spot. He now has a total of nine goals in nine games which makes him the fourth best goalscorer so far in all of the six regional leagues that makes up the swedish fourth tier (the three guys ahead of him have all scored ten goals).
Allison has signed a contract extension with Härnösand. He will stay with the club to the end of 2013.
With four games remaining of the season and a total of 17 goals scored so far Allison currently sit in second place on the combined top goalscorer list for the six regionalized fourth tier leagues. The leader currently has 19 goals. The team is also doing pretty well overall. They're in third place but with the only promotion spot four points away it's going to be a stretch to reach it with so few remaining games. The club have also added Abdul Banguras brother Adnan Bangura to their ranks, and it looks like he has played in college too. No idea if he is also an american citizen.
The club informs me that while Adnan is in fact Abdul's brother, he is not a U.S. citizen (though he does have a green card).
Last game of the season yesterday for Härnösand and Allison made it memorable with both a goal and a red card as his team won 2-1! Härnösand finished in third place with Allison scoring a total of 19 goals in 21 games. With some teams still having one more game left of the season he is currently in third place of the combined top goalscorer list for the six regionalized fourth tier leagues. Like I wrote earlier he extended his contract this summer so it will be interesting to see if any club in a higher division is willing to pay some sort of a transfer fee for him this winter.
According to this article Allison will spend the next couple of weeks doing a small tour of Sweden where he will trial with one Superettan (second tier) club and two clubs from the third tier.
So 43 goals in two seasons? That's a pretty nice haul. What kind of commitment do players at this level usually make; are they training daily? Are they paid anything?
Maybe 5 trainings + 1 game per week if I were to guess? I think that it's fair to say that the ambition and professionalism of the different clubs in the fourth tier can vary quite alot. The same thing is true when it comes to how much (if anything) that the clubs pay their players, or if they d0 things like bringing in any full time foreigners or not.
Maybe not a 100% trustworthy rumour, but the Superettan club is supposedly Jönköpings Södra. Which I guess makes sense with their recent attraction to dual citizen americans
An article in the local paper confirms that he is indeed training with Jönköpings Södra and will play a game with them this weekend.
The Jönköping manager commented yesterday that they want to sign Allison but that the club first has to find someone to take one of their other forwards on loan to make room for him. He says that they might have found that club now which would enable the transfer to go through. Jönköping has apparantly been watching Allison for some time and the manager notes that Allisons strengths are his speed, goalscoring and ability to keep possession. It will be interesting to see how many goals he will be able to score if the transfer goes through. It's a big step up in difficulty level and if you look for example at the two big division 2 (fourth tier) goalscorers from 2011 who made the same move to this years Superettan then one was a total flop while the other one was the second best goalscorer in the league. So things can really go either way.
The other forward ended his contract with Jönköping voluntarily. The manager now says that he will be replaced by either Allison or another forward from the lower divisions.
No luck for Allison as they chose the other forward. However, he didn't waste any time and will now start trialing with another Superettan team, Landskrona BoIS, this week.