And so we arrive at the messy task of trying to squeeze some meaning from the remains of Bob Bradley’s 11-game, 85-day tenure as manager of Swansea City. Which is sort of like attempting to write a multi-volume biography of a newborn.

Even in the managerially promiscuous Premier League, the men temporarily in charge – who are hired mostly to be fired in order to shield the failures of higher-ups – are typically judged on entire seasons. Or at least half seasons. Not on what amounts to less than a third of a Premier League campaign.

We’ll try anyway. Because Bradley’s appointment with the Premier League club was groundbreaking. No American had ever managed in a major European league before, let alone the world’s most popular circuit. And even if the thing turned out a bit of a fiasco, for reasons both within and well beyond Bradley’s control, his lightning flash spell with the Swans was meaningful for the sport stateside, which has long produced great goalkeepers, more recently began churning out good position players, but has yet to conquer the European bench.

And so it’s worth conducting an autopsy and composing a post-mortem into what may have sped up, or slowed down, the evolution of the American manager.

Bradley accepted a job understanding fully that the conditions working against him were stacked high and heavily. For one, he was the first appointment of the new ownership. Over the summer, a pair of Americans had bought the club from a beloved group that had saved Swansea from ruin after taking it on for a single British Pound – as an act of patronage to the locals, as much as anything. The group then lifted the Swans from the basement of the fourth tier to the top half of the Premier League in the span of just a decade.

The mistrusted new owners fired veteran Serie A manager Francesco Guidolin on Oct. 3 and installed a countryman, from a nation that had never produced a Premier League manager before. Clumsily, it did so without consulting the supporters’ trust, which owns 20 percent of the club. As such, Bradley’s hiring was bungled procedurally, undermining his position before he’d even begun.

He was the new ownership’s man. And the new ownership already didn’t sit well with supporters. Bradley became a proxy. It wasn’t long before the fans chanted for his ouster, and it was hard not to hear echoes of contempt for the owners in their song.

Bradley was hired over Ryan Giggs, one of the best Welsh players ever. It was another strike against him.

“Giggs played nearly 1,000 games for Manchester United spread over 24 years,” moaned former player-turned-pundit Robbie Savage, also a Welshman. “What he doesn’t know about the Premier League, and what Swansea need to do if they want to stay in it, probably isn’t worth knowing.”

Never mind that Giggs had little managerial experience and that his playing days were largely irrelevant, since they were spent entirely with a team that didn’t worry about relegation for a single one of those days.

Problematically, Bradley didn’t resemble a Premier League manager. Not in his resume, not in his accent, and not in his appearance. He wasn’t a famous former player and hadn’t managed a Premier League team before – the only acceptable qualifications in the eyes of plenty. He didn’t speak like a Brit or sound like a European – not even, as a last resort, like a South American. He had no natural talent for wearing an expensive overcoat. Strike three.

Many in England – or, possibly, a loud and influential minority in the press and on social media – still see the United States as a soccer backwater, even though it has performed as well or better than England in three of the last four World Cups. The American player may have made inroads, but with no precedent of a successful American manager in England – or a prior case of any kind – there was suspicion about Bradley from the outset. So what if he had coached two national teams well, told a Cinderella story with puny Stabaek in Norway, and largely performed to expectations with Le Havre in the French second division and in Major League Soccer, even winning MLS Cup with an expansion team.

A narrative of ineptitude was preordained for him.

And then evidence was found after the fact. This is called confirmation bias.

One pundit soon accused Bradley of failing to bring in the right kind of players, and suggested he didn’t know how, even though Bradley hadn’t yet gotten to a transfer window – and never would.

When Bradley referred to a penalty as a “PK” once, and an away match as a “road game,” this would not stand. He was pilloried for the crime of coming from a country where they have different words for the same things, even though plenty of his managerial peers in the Premier League speak broken English.

After his firing, one tabloid pointed to his refusal of the Mercedes the club had made available to underscore “the fact he did not fit into the Premier League.”

There are some things we can say uncontroversially about Bradley’s time at Swansea.

He accepted a tough job. The Swans faced relegation and sagged further down the standings – from 17th to 19th and tied on points with last-place Hull City – on his watch. A bad defense got worse, giving up 25 goals in his 11 games. His team showed flashes of good soccer and raised its points-per-game ratio from 0.57 in Guidolin’s seven matches to 0.72. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t help himself much by losing his last three games. The players seemed to like him. He never got a transfer window to glean some reinforcement from a typically thin January market.

All the rest is conjecture, a broad reading of a narrow set of facts.

Swansea is a desperate club caught in a multi-season tailspin. The rot set in a few years ago when the team stopped playing the expansive soccer that had endeared it to many upon its return to the Premier League and earned it the nickname Swanselona. Last year, a 12th place was salvaged, by Guidolin, from the wreckage of a relegation fight. But this summer, its two best players were sold in defender (and captain) Ashley Williams and winger (and leading scorer) Andre Ayew. Neither was properly replaced. Guidolin said that survival should be the target this year, either setting a low bar for himself to clear or being disarmingly frank.

The sample size we now attempt to judge Bradley by is tiny. Even a farmer needs at least a season before he can coax a crop from a fallow field. He lost three of his first four games and tied the other. Then came a brief turnaround with two wins and a tie in four. And then Bradley lost three more by a combined score of 10-2. That was it.

He changed his team a lot, especially the hapless defense. Some called it panic. But what else are you supposed to do when you’re the captain and your ship is sinking without trace? At the very least, you can rearrange the deck chairs. At least he wasn’t idle, standing on the bridge, watching the water rise to his mouth. You could just as easily argue that all those changes prevented any kind of rhythm or chemistry.

This is the thing about Bradley’s time in Wales. It was so short that any kind of opinion is half-formed. There wasn’t time to bake any thought fully through.

Those leery of Americans could decide that their misgivings were confirmed, just as Bradley’s defenders have a wide array of mitigating circumstances to excuse his failure. It might be tempting to try to frame a period of less than three months as some kind of referendum on where American soccer is three decades into its modern era, but it’s fruitless.

Bob Bradley at Swansea City was a blip. And you can’t get a good reading from something that was over and gone before you had a good look at it.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.

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