About a month ago, an internet RENEGADE took to the open air of Reddit to voice his full-throated support of Jurgen Klinsmann. That, in itself, was fine. He threw out a few non sequiturs, jabbed with a diseased but working right hand, misspelled a couple words. It was good fun. I won’t link to it, because it was crafted like a fourth grade Halloween mask, but suffice it to say the comments section had its day.

Until, that is, he turned his cracked spotlight on Bob Bradley, who he criticized wholeheartedly. This is when the hackles went up, the canines unsheathed themselves from their scabbards and blood pooled under the skin.

In essence, he didn’t know anything about what Bradley was doing in Norway. Bradley been fired from the head job at Egypt, he knew, but beyond that? Bradley was probably middling along with the wolves and the giants (probably?) in Scandinavia, 4-4-2ing himself into a coma while the sun never rises or never sets. Or, you know. Whatever happens in Norway.

In fact, Bradley has Stabæk on the precipice of European qualification in his second season at the rudder. And the job he’s done there is a winger short of a miracle. Let me explain.

To understand why Bradley’s reversal is so impressive, you need to understand Stabæk football. In 2012, just two years before Bradley’s arrival, Stabæk was a barely moving train full of lit explosives. Under coach Petter Belsvik, who’d never been a full-time head coach before, Stabæk lost nine of its first 10 games (they were outscored 25-3 to start the season), finished 5-2-23 (that’s European parlance: they lost 23 of 30 games) and were relegated for the first time in eight years. Stabæk’s goal differential was minus-44, 27 goals worse than any other team in the league. The team had qualified for the Europa League via Fair Play through its play the season before. It played a Finnish side named JJK, which finished ninth that season in the Veikkausliiga. Out of 12 teams. Stabæk lost both legs.

Belsvik survived the drop, somehow, and Stabæk toiled in relative anonymity for a season in the wilds of Norway’s second tier.

While all this was going on, Stabæk had just emerged from a fractious stadium battle that exposed the club’s rotting inner beams. In October 2009, a group of 10 investors purchased Stabæk out from Stabæk Holding in the midst of procuring the right to play in the €65 million Telenor Arena, which had just been completed months earlier. There was now a split in operation: Stabæk Holding owned the arena. The investors owned the team. The new ownership group immediately negotiated a 40-year lease (!) on the stadium. The agreement lasted about a month.

That November, Stabæk Holding (which soon reorganized as Euforum Holding) announced crippling debt and dangled the prospect of bankruptcy. At the same time, it told Stabæk’s new ownership group it had no intention of honoring the lease. The company wanted to use the arena to reel in major events and concerts, which had to be booked out a year or two in advance. How could they do that if they didn’t know the league schedule until a few months before each season? And Rihanna wasn’t playing Oslo in December.

After two years of contentious jockeying, Stabæk, which exhausted several avenues of unsuccessful compromise, lost the stadium. Both sides slinked away from the battle with debt, but Stabæk’s loss was more palpable. They returned to the humble 7,000-seat Nadderud Stadium, build in 1961, where they still play today.

Their first year back in that stadium was 2012. They won five games.

The next season went well enough. Belsvik guided Stabæk to second place in the second tier and automatic promotion on the final day of the season, but he was gone from the club soon after the season ended. That created the void that Bradley filled.

In hindsight, Bradley’s first season in charge was the table setting. You could see the plates being spun onto the table, the forks laid over the napkins, the soup spoon and the charger plate and everything else. Stabæk finished ninth, almost bang-on mid-table; 10 points ahead of relegation and 11 behind Europa League qualification. It was a good season. But it also fostered the kind of anonymity expressed so eloquently by our Reddit Warrior. Mid-table in Norway doesn’t earn you points among the EPL-In-The-Morning set.

Bradley spun into furious motion before the 2015 season, cutting ties or loaning out 12 players – most of them from the diseased Belsvik era – and signing six of his own. One of those was Adama Diomande, a once promising Norwegian forward who’d languished for a year at Dinamo Minsk in the Belarusian Premier League. Bradley signed him before the season for peanuts, watched him score 25 goals in 26 games and sold him to Hull City for £1.7 million in September.

Ernest Asante, another of his winter preseason signings, currently leads the team in goals. Yassine El Ghanassy and Kamal Issah, two more Bradley guys, have been key cogs this season. Notably, former Duke/RSL/Columbus Crew player Cole Grossman has also enjoyed a career renaissance in Norway under Bradley.

In two seasons, Bradley took a fractured Stabæk organization and turned it from a middling club with provincial aspirations to a squad with an outside shot at its second league title in more than 100 years of existence. It had been five years since Stabæk finished above 10th in the league before Bradley arrived. This is where the club stands today.

Bradley’s Stabæk slapped down Molde 1-0 on Sunday night to solidify its hold on a spot in the Europa League. With five matches left, it seems unlikely Stabæk will catch leaders Rosenberg, which would give Bradley the opportunity (should he get through qualifying) to become the first American to lead a team in a Champions League group match. But a steady grasp on second place two years after the team was piddling through a season in the second tier is no lean feat.

It’s no fluke, either. After an early feeling-out period, Stabæk’s been in second place in the league for 19 of the last 20 weeks, including for the entirety of the last two months. Paying for Bradley means paying for consistency. We know that as much as anyone.

It’s understandable even the wider soccer population of the U.S. isn’t well aware of the vast transformation project Bradley’s undertaken in a sleepy municipality just outside Oslo. But consider yourself informed. What our own Bob Bradley’s done in Norway underneath that familiar, icy gaze should not go unnoticed.