Target Man
Towering Norwegian Sebastian Andreassen, a must-see goalscorer for fans and never-want-to-see again opponent for defenders.
If you had to carve a center-forward from stone, they might look something like Sebastian Andreassen: 6-foot-4, 190 pounds, blonde, shoulder-length hair—like a Scandinavian Achilles, with a magnetic forehead for smashing into a winger’s crosses and legs that stretch past the average man’s torso.
“He’s somebody you want on the frontlines when you go to war,” says One Knoxville head coach Mark McKeever, who recruited Andreassen to the United States to play for Young Harris College in 2017 and used him as his #9 with the Des Moines Menace last summer.
“He’s the type of forward that when center-backs come off the field, they’ll be saying they never want to play against him again.”
In three seasons at Young Harris, Andreassen scored 21 goals and tallied 17 assists, twice named to the All-Peach Belt Conference first team. His junior year, he scored three game-winning goals, including a (literal) last-second, overtime winner against North Georgia. In 2021, Andreassen scored five and added four assists in 10 games for Des Moines as it won its division, conference, and the USL League Two national title.
When he got the call to join McKeever in Knoxville, Andreassen was quick to accept. Years earlier, when he was still an academy player in Norway, the gaffer had sold him on the dream of America. He wasn’t let down. With aspirations of professional football in the future for both the club and player, Knoxville is the ideal home.
“Playing professional in Knoxville would be an absolute dream” says Andreassen, who has also played with the Cincinnati Dutch Lions in USL 2 and Palm Beach United in the NPSL1.
“And I’ve done a little bit of my research.”
The big Norwegian is a country music fan. Among his favorite artists are Brad Paisley, Midland, Darius Rucker and the inimitable Dolly Parton.
“Knoxville—as a city, the culture—has a lot of appeal for me,” he says. “I’ve even convinced my parents in Norway to visit, ‘Hey, I’m going to Knoxville, so you have to come see it.’”
Leading the Line
The most famous Norwegian footballer of the past two decades, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was also a striker with a knack for scoring goals at the most pivotal moments. At Manchester United, where he played for 11 years and was most recently head coach, he holds the record for most goals by a substitute (28)2.
Solskjaer is the reason many Norwegians pledged their loyalty to the red half of Manchester in the 1990s.
“I’m sitting here in my Man United pants right now,” says Andreassen, laughing, his fandom inherited through his mother.
From the dreamy seaport town of Alesund, Andreassen grew up with soccer always out in the streets or on the television set.
“I don’t remember going up to my grandparent’s house without soccer being on 24/7,” he says.
On a grassy hill in his neighborhood, Andreassen and his friends, from the age of 4, spent hours every day kicking around a ball. They camped on soccer fields to make sure nothing interrupted their obsession.
“You can’t just go to the gym, lift, and be a good soccer player,” he says. “You need to able to produce technical quality with your feet, which is one of the most difficult skills for a normal person to do. And there’s so few goals, so to me they are so meaningful. It creates such a heightened emotion when the goals come.”
Before leaving for the U.S., Andreassen featured in juniors and reserves sides for his local club, Aalesunds FK, which currently plays in the Norwegian first division. He admires another powerful Scandinavian striker, the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovic, whose Wikipedia page is so stuffed with accolades it reads like a novella3.
“He is the king,” Andreassen says. “He scores goals for fun. He’s an absolute monster at 40. He does things with the ball that just aren’t normal.”
While they share physical attributes, Andreassen’s style more closely resembles that of Olivier Giroud, the French World Cup winner4.
The Norwegian will score goals—no doubt. But he won’t just be a target man inside the box. He will take the ball anywhere in the attacking third, hold it up like a moving man-statue, bringing central and wide players behind him into the game. A leading man, a forehead for crosses and an Everest for defenders to attempt scaling—exactly the kind of striker One Knoxville will need for the lightning-quick transitions McKeever favors.
Currently, Andreassen is recuperating from a knee injury he suffered in the conference quarterfinals with Des Moines last July. Though he expects to be fully fit by this summer.
“He was our most effective and most important player going into the playoffs,” says James Thomas, club captain and a teammate of Andreassen’s at both Young Harris and for the Menace.
“Without him, we wouldn’t have won a national title—there’s no question about it.”
As soon as the referee blew his whistle, and Des Moines were declared champions, Andreassen was the first to run—or hobble, his knee wrapped like a zombie’s, crutches in both hands—onto the field screaming in celebration.
“He’s one of the most committed human beings I’ve met,” Thomas says.
And Knoxville will see it every second he’s on the pitch.
“I will give it all to win,” Andreassen says.
Player Snapshot
Age: 24
Hometown: Alesund, Norway
Position: Striker/center-forward
College: Central Arkansas (2021-, NCAA DI), Young Harris (2017-20, NCAA DII)
Previous clubs: Des Moines Menace (2021, USL 2), Cincinnati Dutch Lions (2019, USL 2), Palm Beach United (2018, NPSL)
Gaffer’s Take
“Seba is not trying to move like a 5-foot-6 lad, playing like (Lionel) Messi or (Cristiano) Ronaldo. He sticks to what he’s good at: causing problems off the ball. He won’t allow opponents to play at the back. He’ll be breathing down their neck. He’ll make it a physical battle. And he’ll bring other players into the game. The expression to put your head in where it hurts, that’s Seba.”
Watch Andreasson in Action
For those with a memory of soccer in the city, Knoxville’s last semipro men’s team, the Knoxville Force, competed for eight seasons in the National Premier Soccer League (or NPSL), the fourth tier of the U.S. Soccer pyramid at the time, before folding in 2018.
If you like to follow a detail down a rabbit hole, as I do, you can read more about Solskjaer, who is literally a knight back home in Norway, and his super-sub exploits here.
Zlatan, who is still active at 40, is the only player to score in the UEFA Champions League for six teams, to score on his debut in five leagues, to have scored a goal in derby games in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, England, and the U.S., and is one of only three active players—the others being Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo—to have more than 550 goals in all competitions.
Coincidentally, Giroud is club teammates with Ibrahimovic at Italy’s AC Milan.