He played for QPR and Spurs, then returned to professional sport with a helmet on | OneFootball

Clive Allen played for eight different London football clubs, including QPR & Spurs, but only seven of them played the round-ball version of the game.

Clive Allen was a familiar face to the supporters of London clubs throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, but at the end of his football career he made the unusual choice to switch codes.

There are many different versions of football, and some of them don't make great use of using the foot in connection with the ball. In the case of Australian Rules Football, there is practically no connection formal to the game that would come to be so prominent in the rest of the world.

These different codes require very different skill-sets, and players who have successfully switched from one code to another have been extremely rare throughout the entire history of the game.

But in the case of the former Spurs, QPR and England star Clive Allen, a high-profile switch to American football came about two years after his retirement from the round-ball game, and while the franchise for whom he played would end up failing, this wasn't anything to do with the player himself.

Clive Allen didn't spend much time outside London throughout a 17-year football career

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Clive Allen's career was punctuated by extraordinary moments and periods. He made his debut from the bench for Queens Park Rangers against Chelsea in November 1978 but had to wait five months to make his first appearance in their starting eleven. When he did, he landed with a bang, scoring a hat-trick in a 5-1 win for Rangers against Coventry City.

In the summer of 1980, Allen was subject to one of the strangest transfer stories of the new decade. Arsenal paid £1.25 million for him that June, but although he played three pre-season games for them, as the new season started he was told by the Arsenal manager Terry Neill that he would be leaving for Crystal Palace in a swap deal that would take full-back Kenny Sansom, a player that Neill desperately wanted, to Highbury. In the end, Allen never played a competitive game for the Gunners.

Not long into his time with Palace, Allen would become involved in one of the most controversial refereeing decisions of the decade. In a League match away to Coventry City on the 6th September 1980, Allen thought he'd scored a superb early goal from a free-kick, only for it to not be given because the match officials thought the ball had bounced out off the woodwork when it had really hit one of the stanchions holding the net back and had quite evidently crossed the line. Relatively few matches were recorded on video at that time, but this one happened to be featured on that evening's Match of the Day, which only raised its profile further, becoming known as The Goal That Never Was.

Allen returned to Loftus Road the following year and was part of the QPR team that reached the 1982 FA Cup Final and were promoted to the First Division the following year. In 1984, he made another cross-London switch, this time to Spurs, and there he set a club record when he scored 49 goals in all competitions in the 1986-87 season before moving to France to play for Bordeaux.

This move was not a success, and when Allen returned to England in 1989 it was to Manchester rather than London, when he signed for Manchester City. But after two years at Maine Road, he returned to London again, playing for Chelsea, West Ham United and Millwall before wrapping up his playing career in 1995 with three games for Carlisle United.

London Monarchs offered Allen something different at the end of a long playing career

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Two years after his retirement from association football, though, Allen got a call to take up a different form of football. The World League of American Football - later NFL Europe - had been formed in 1991 to take advantage of their version of the game's growing popularity outside the USA, and one of the cities chosen for a franchise was London, through the London Monarchs team.

But by the time of their 1997 season, the Monarchs were struggling. They'd already moved from Wembley to London, and then to Stamford Bridge, and while it's not known whether the drive behind this decision was geared solely towards creating publicity, approaching Allen was certainly an opportunity for the former England international to try something different.

Clive Allen was no American footballer, but that didn't really matter. He could kick a professional level and the Monarchs wanted him as a placekicker - the player responsible for attempts at scoring field goals and extra points - which didn't require him to be of a similar build to the other American football players.

And the former England striker found his feet in this new game. Writing in The Independent in May 1997, journalist Nick Halling wrote that: "Allen has began to find his feet on the gridiron. The former round ball specialist made a slow start to his American football career, but he seems to have established his rhythm." In total, he converted six out of six field goals and seven out of ten extra points. In a nod to his former sport, he was given the number nine shirt to wear.

But Allen couldn't rescue the ailing franchise. He only played one season, and for the following one they were renamed as England Monarchs and the franchise was folded in 1999. Clive Allen has gone on to do a lot of media work since then. This was never going to be the high watermark of Clive Allen's career, but he'll be long-remembered in the capital following a career that took in seven different London clubs; eight, if you include a different sport altogether.