And it likely that it was there that the football bug was, if not caught, then incubated. He is said to have turned out for Oxford, a Crosshill team, for East Kilbride and Busby, and was to be asked to join Third Lanark, Crosshill's leading team at the time. However, the teacher-training was completed successfully at the end of 1877 and, whilst there is much made of him having enrolled at Glasgow University, to study medicine in 1877 and botany in 1878, he did not graduate, possibly did it as a side and in the meantime probably worked as a teacher in and around Glasgow, the football being an indicator of where. That was before in April 1879 being appointed as Second Assistant Master at Hendon Road School in Sunderland, with perhaps the draw to the area being that older brother, William, had already moved to and married in it. 

Slightly-built and clearly competitive, as James would prove on the pitch, he was also obviously still football-mad. Within months of arrival he had begun the formation of the Sunderland and District Teachers' Association Football Club, of which he was said to be vice-captain. It played its first competitive game in September 1880, the following month changing its name to Sunderland A.F.C., although actually being a Roker, north of the Wear club, and at the same time opening recruitment to all-comers. Meantime he was also obviously active socially and in terms of career. In late 1880 he married a local lass, Priscilla Birlison. She was eighteen, he just short of twenty-three and their first child, one of nine, was born early the following year. And in June that same year he was moved by the Education Board to another school and promoted.  

As a footballer James Allan, a not untalented forward, would continue to turn out for Sunderland, his brother also in the team from 1882, and in 1883-4 joined by a T. Birlison. And 1884 was also when James was accused of attempting to bribe an opposing player. The matter was buried but it was something of a portent. By 1886 Willie Allan, by then almost forty, had dropped out of the team and by 1888 Jimmy, at thirty, was playing the occasional friendly only as the club now heavily recruited professional players, many from Scotland. That season there were sixteen from north of the border, when that number had previously been just 2 and 6. Moreover James Allan was Club Treasurer but obviously not happy. 

There had been accusations, in part against Allan as a Scot, that players from north of the border were being preferred over English ones. In reality it not surprising. The Scots players were better and Sunderland was far from alone in England in recruiting them en masse, if not to quite the same extent. Moreover, the club had managed to get itself disqualified from the Cup for paying players illegally. Allan, as ultimate paymaster, was under pressure and his reaction was to plot behind the club's back to form with heavy, local, financial backing Albion, a south of the river rival. It was founded in March 1888, said to be amateur but took seven players from professional Sunderland and brought down, amongst others, Jimmy Hannah from Scotland to play as a shamateur.