ÄNGELHOLM, Sweden — The drive to Catena Arena takes you past rows of picturesque houses and a vast, grassy pasture, where blanketed horses graze through winter. It’s quiet and idyllic, as you’d expect in a Swedish city of 40,000.

Once you take the turn left into the parking lot, though, the small-town feel ebbs. The arena holds 6,310 fans, and it vibrates with their chants and their songs.

Down in the locker room on game night, as the crowd’s song gives way to piped-in Guns N’ Roses, you can see the former player inside of Chris Abbott awaken. Only now, as general manager, he has no recourse but to fidget, tapping a water bottle against his side as his team takes the ice.

“Let’s go win a hockey game,” says the team’s longtime equipment manager, Frederik “Fidde” Andersen, as Abbott exits the room and heads to his suite.

This is the same program that gave Abbott and his twin brother Cam — now Rögle’s head coach — their start in the Swedish Hockey League nearly 15 years ago. When they arrived as import players from Canada, the club lived in the league’s fringes, up and down like clockwork between the SHL and the second-division Allsvenskan.

Now, much has changed. Long after playing one year for the club in 2008-09, the Abbotts returned to Ängelholm in 2017, taking over the club’s operations midseason with big ambitions.

Historically, Rögle had been “happy to be here” in the SHL, Andersen says. But the Abbotts wanted to win it. And they said so. Out loud.

“At the beginning we laughed at it, and we thought of it as good headlines for us,” says Daniel Rooth, sports editor and columnist for the local newspaper, Helsingborgs Dagblad.

Instead, they made headlines for a different reason. The club made a run to the SHL final in 2021, finishing in the league’s regular-season top three each of the last three seasons. Last year, they won the European Champions Hockey League, the first major championship in club history. Along the way, Rögle has developed elite NHL prospects, including the Red Wings’ Moritz Seider and 2022 No. 8 pick Marco Kasper. Now, inevitably, the Abbotts’ names have begun to pop up in the NHL’s orbit.

The narrative is, admittedly, hard to resist: twin Canadian brothers — labeled the “reverse Sedins” in their playing days — taking a club from worst to first in a land far away, destined to someday do the same in the NHL, and helping to break the barrier for coaches and executives in Europe in the process.

Around Rögle, there are many who believe that day could (and should) come for their leaders. Even now, in the midst of perhaps their most trying season yet, as Rögle and the Abbotts try to satisfy their club’s raised ambitions, the fact this arena in a small corner of Southwest Sweden has begun to capture the hockey world’s attention shows why.

“Before they came, I don’t think there was one single person here that thought this could be an SM-Gold-winning team,” Rooth says. “I think that has changed completely.”

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The Abbotts’ long road to the SHL is a story of its own. Raised in Sarnia, Ontario, their hockey careers took them to Cornell for college, then Shreveport, La., and then Norway, before Rögle gave them a chance in one of the top leagues in Europe.

The club had just been promoted after a long run in the second-tier league, and in Year 1 the Abbotts were their two leading scorers. They left for Luleå, an established SHL power in the North, after that season, and at the end of that following year, Rögle found itself relegated once again.

This, for a time, was just Rögle’s lot in life: They earned their way back to the SHL in 2012, then were relegated in 2013; promoted in 2015, then back on the brink in the 2016-17 season, narrowly avoiding another relegation.

By that 2016-17 season, Cam had retired as a player and was coaching junior players in Växjö. Chris was in his final season, captaining HV71 to an SHL championship — albeit one that saw him miss the final due to a career-ending broken neck suffered in practice just days before the championship series began. In 2017, he was working in player development for HV71 when the opportunity came to interview with Rögle’s then-CEO Marcus Thuresson.

He and Cam put together a plan on how they might approach coming into the team. In his mind, that plan was for the following season. But with the team struggling and another relegation possible, the switch came midseason.

“I think it was the first day, at a meeting (with the team), I think we were sitting there for an hour and they were talking about, ‘We’re gonna win,’” recalls Linus Sandin, one of the team’s forwards.

In the 14-team SHL, being one of the 10 teams to make the postseason was one thing. Winning it was something else.

It may sound obvious — or even rote — that new coaches and management would come into a new job intending to win in a competitive league. In Sweden, though, this drew attention. Some of the league’s other coaches even told Abbott they felt it was inappropriate.

“When you’re a bottom team,” says Rögle’s now-captain Anton Bengtsson, “that’s not Swedish to say that.”

Lagom is a Swedish word and philosophy that, as Cam Abbott puts it, “means everything is just right.” Not too much. Not too little.

For so long, Rögle had been content surviving in the SHL. In an instant, their ambitions were very publicly beyond that.

“For sure, that was a little bit un-Swedish,” Chris Abbott acknowledges. “But that’s the way we truly feel, and felt at the time, and I would do it the same way. I mean, in fact, if I was to roll back the clock, I think to even make that assertion even stronger and make some decisions even quicker.”

Rooth, who has covered the club for more than 20 years, is quick to note: Rögle had been growing economically even before the Abbotts arrived. And the city, while comparatively small, is extremely devoted to its team.

Walk the streets of Ängelholm, and you see green Rögle flags on storefronts and homes. Rooth says Rögle “is the city,” and Andersen guesses that of the 40,000 people who live here, around 25,000 have likely come to Catena for a game.

“They live and die by the team, which is great,” says forward Adam Tambellini, a Canadian who has played for the team since 2020. “It’s so much different from a game back home. It’s just one of those things, you have to come here and see it to really feel the full experience.”

Taken together, then, the ground was fertile for a big step forward. Players embraced the raised bar. Practices got harder.

“The mindset changed really quick,” Sandin says.

And yet, that alone was not going to change the team’s fortunes.

“It’s not just like they’re Canadians and they said that they want to win and then it happened,” says Hampus Sjöström, the club’s assistant GM for the last two seasons. “They made a lot of good choices along the way.”

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When Shawn Horcoff first met the Abbotts, he was making a similar transition. Horcoff had just retired after a long NHL career and was working in the Red Wings’ front office on assignment in Sweden when Chris Abbott came over and introduced himself.

As they talked, Horcoff understood their vision. Knowing it would be hard at first to get star players, they would focus on development — bringing in good young players, growing them, and then as they made an impact on the men’s team, results would improve and start attracting even more talent.

“They had a clear-cut plan of how they wanted to run that team and where it was going in the near future, 1-2 years out, and how they were going to execute it,” Horcoff says.

Chris says the team looks for three main attributes in players in addition to character as a bedrock: competitiveness, skating and hockey sense.

And behind the bench, Cam is “in the fight with you,” Tambellini says. “He wants to win. He lives this. He breathes this. This is what he’s all about. Same with Chris. And I think our whole staff is like that. It’s an all-in kind of thing.”

In 2018-19, their first full season, the club added 17-year-old forward Nils Höglander and played him 50 games on the men’s team, turning him into a second-round NHL draft pick of the Canucks. The next year they picked up Rangers draft pick Adam Edström, threw him right into the fire and finished third in the regular-season standings.

In 2020-21, they landed Seider while the NHL and AHL sorted through COVID-19 uncertainty and helped him reach a new level. They lured Tambellini, a former AHLer who had been playing in the Allsvenskan, and helped him develop into an SHL star and eventually an Olympian for Canada. Homegrown product Simon Ryfors blossomed, earning a contract with the Lightning.

It’s not just finding and recruiting talented players, either. When Cam talks about his brother, he’s quick to note Chris is good at “evaluating how players will fit within our team.”

Around Sweden, other young players took notice. Before 2021-22, Rangers third-round pick Oliver Tärnstrom and Red Wings second-rounder William Wallinder flocked to Ängelholm. They’d heard about how the club worked with its young players — and Wallinder’s trajectory quickly made a sharp upward pivot. This year, Canadiens third-round pick Adam Engström joined the fold and became a real SHL contributor at just 19.

Even beyond Sweden, players like Austrian Marco Kasper chose Rögle for formative years. After two years in the system, he was playing a key role in the SHL playoffs and was a top-10 pick last summer.

“Their development structure is excellent,” says Horcoff, who was promoted to assistant GM by the Red Wings last season. “Their off-ice strength program is excellent. Their coaching philosophy — one thing about Cam is he really preaches intensity and work ethic and high pace, and that kind of stuff is how you get better, (with) intense and competitive practices, high-pace practices.”

Rögle went to the SHL Championship series in 2021, and then topped the regular-season standings and won the Champions Hockey League — at home, no less — in 2022.

“It’s always been a dream to win something here,” Andersen says. “And then to do it, it’s like, the best feeling ever. You want to do it again.”

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With that kind of quick turnaround in one of the world’s top hockey leagues, it seems only natural that NHL curiosity would follow.

Cultivating an identity, finding players — especially young players — who fit it, and developing them is what every NHL organization strives for. In Ängelholm, the Abbotts have done it.

In recent years, however, coaches and executives jumping from Europe to the NHL and AHL have been few and far between. A rare example: Chicago hired Canadian-born Jeremy Colliton to coach its AHL affiliate in Rockford after he led Mora IK out of the Allsvenskan in 2017. The Blackhawks eventually promoted him to NHL coach.

The path for true Europeans has been even more limited — Colliton brought over Tomas Mitell (a former assistant coach of his in Sweden) to his NHL staff, but no European has been hired as an NHL head coach since Ivan Hlinka and Alpo Suhonen in 2000-01.

The league does have two European general managers in Columbus’ Jarmo Kekalainen and Vancouver’s Patrik Allvin, but only Kekalainen actually worked as a manager in Europe, and he did so while also having extensive experience in NHL front offices.

There’s no single answer for why the pipeline from Europe has been so untapped. One element could be the larger ice in Europe, and the different play style it nurtures (more possession-based, with more time, and not as physical). But beyond that, the simplest guess might be the best one: It can often be most comfortable to hire out of the pathways that are already producing success, such as the AHL and college and junior hockey.

There may be differences between the play style, or the structure of the league. But at some point, scouting is scouting, managing is managing, coaching is coaching, and hockey is hockey.

And already, there are those in NHL front offices who have followed the Abbotts’ rise and believe they could one day make the leap.

“I haven’t talked to them personally about that,” Horcoff says of the idea of the Abbotts returning to North America. “But if they wanted to, I’m sure they could easily do it.”

When asked, Chris grants that he “absolutely” could see himself and his brother one day being open to the NHL.

But neither Abbott is especially eager to delve too deep into the subject.

“I don’t even really want to talk about that,” Cam says, when asked if he’s thinking about that jump. “But to answer your question directly, no. … I’m a little bit flattered, but no. I’ve just been so entrenched in trying to win a championship here. I think it’s important to (be) committed to being here and to keeping the head down, working at that. Family’s here, kids are in school. It would be a big, family type of decision to ever talk even about those types of opportunities should they come up.”

“We’ve got an unbelievable situation here, both personally with our families, the people we get to work with here, the organization, the sponsorship,” Chris says. “Specifically the board and the trust we have from them. That’s not something you find really easily, and something that would be tough to move on from.”

The point Cam raised about his family is a major one. While Chris’ wife, Kendall, is from Michigan, Cam’s wife, Malin, is from Sweden. Both have families now, and this season, in what little spare time he has, Cam is coaching his oldest son, William, for Rögle’s youngest age group, the 2015 birth year.

Among the things Cam likes about the setup in Sweden is the connectivity from the senior team all the way down to the under-8s. His son’s team practices twice a week, right next door, and wears the same uniform as the professionals. Sometimes, players like Kasper and Tärnstrom will come skate with them, to the kids’ delight. And while having the local SHL coach on their staff would normally be about as big as it can get for those kids, it’s actually not the case for this team, which counts Red Wings legend Henrik Zetterberg among its parent-coaches.

“I try and tell William, ‘stop watching Daddy,’” Cam says, “‘and keep an eye on the guy with the red gloves over there.’”

The joy in his voice talking about those experiences — even when he laments “but gosh, it’s tough when we lose, and they tell me about it when I come into the rink” — is palpable.

Cam is a coach whose job is almost always to think in the now. Chris is a GM, which by definition demands a longer-term perspective. That’s a dynamic that has surely helped shape their current success. But for twin brothers whose careers have been about as shared as pro sports can possibly allow for, there’s an inevitable curiosity, too: What if North America calls to them at different times?

“Who knows what the future holds?” Chris says. “I couldn’t tell you. Just enjoying having our kids growing up around each other, 700 meters apart (between) our houses, and working together every day — it’s been fun. It is fun.”

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For as much as Rögle has grown — and won — since the Abbotts arrived, they still have not yet won the SHL championship. And that fact is certainly on their mind.

“I want to win a championship with this club,” Cam says. “It was nice to win the Champions Hockey League last year, but yeah, winning an SHL championship is something (we’ve) been grinding for and we’ll keep grinding for it. But … it’s never going to come easy.”

This year, that’s been especially true. After three straight years in the league’s top three, Rögle had to go through the play-in round to make the playoffs, amid a season in which seemingly everything that could go wrong did. But the bedrock of the organization’s transformation is still there.

Up in the management suite during a game, the fire and passion that changed Rögle’s culture is clear in Chris, whether he’s fist pumping after a goal, or thinking out loud about the team’s play at the net front.

One of Chris’ heroes growing up as a player was Steve Yzerman, and he’s developed a similar affinity for Yzerman’s work in management, first in Tampa Bay and then in Detroit. He even stops in Detroit at times, to observe and talk with Horcoff and Yzerman.

And one of the best compliments you can pay to Yzerman as a general manager is that when he left the Lightning in 2019, the organization kept on humming without him, winning consecutive Stanley Cups. That was partly due to the players he brought in, of course, but also a testament to the personnel he worked with in the front office, including now-GM Julien BriseBois.

Maybe it should be no surprise, then, that in Ängelholm, Chris says his role has in part been “collecting people.” That includes Sjöström — a former administrator with the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation who joined the club as an assistant GM two years ago. And analyst Zach Ellenthal, an American-born analyst for the team who formerly ran the SHL analytics website Svengelska Hockey. The club even has a new CEO, Daniel Koch, a business leader who Chris says has “just been amazing” during the club’s growth.

Viewing Rögle’s transformation primarily as a means to an NHL end, of course, would be missing the point. But these people, if the Abbotts ever were to move on, are part of the reason Rögle would not have to just revert back to what it was before.

“This is kind of the identity of the club now,” Andersen says.

As much as anything, that kind of transformation is why anyone who hasn’t yet noticed the Abbotts will before long. Someday, that may well lead to even brighter lights and an even bigger challenge.

Maybe soon, or maybe not. Maybe together, or maybe apart. That’s all off in the distance.

For now, though, perhaps everything is just right.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic. Photos: Allison Farrand for The Athletic)