'A club for life' How caring ethos powered Norwegian YMCA team all the way to the top flight

Football's ability to conjure ridiculous stories is legion, but even so the one about the YMCA club in Norway's Eliteserien is ridiculous.

- Daniel Harris

Yet that is exactly where KFUM-Kameratene Oslo find themselves: on Tuesday, they make their top-fight debut with a home game against HamKam. Though KFUM remain a local community club - their ground holds only 3,000 and is accessed via a zebra crossing - their rise has been meticulously planned.

"We have learned year by year," says Tor-Erik Stenberg, the general manager. "Small changes to be more and more professional." So they began by giving players amateur contracts, then moved training from evening to daytime, then focused on better marketing, and so on; this season, fortified with the funds to improve more than one aspect, they have added a match analyst, expanded their medical department, and taken the team abroad for warm-weather training.

Sensible, patient growth may be unusual in football, but Stenberg attributes KFUM's success not to its processes but to its culture. "We are a YMCA club," he says. "We have a Christian-based foundation with Christian values: forgiveness, love, caring. That doesn't mean that we don't fight - on the field, football is football. It doesn't mean that we don't get angry, but it has to do with how we behave before and afterwards."