From game show winnings to Old Trafford: the Sabah manager facing Manchester United in the Champions League

Valdas Dambrauskas will take his seat in the Old Trafford dugout this week as the manager of Sabah FK, Azerbaijan’s first-time champions, when they face Manchester United in the Champions League league phase. It is a long way from the Lithuanian television studio where his coaching career effectively began.

Dambrauskas, 49, won the equivalent of £725 on a Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and used the prize money to relocate to England with his girlfriend — later his wife — to enrol on a sports science and coaching course at London Metropolitan University. The funds ran out almost immediately.

“After we’d paid for our flights and accommodation, we had money left to cover our expenses for just one month, so I needed to get a part-time job urgently,” Dambrauskas told FourFourTwo. “At the time I still couldn’t speak English properly, but they liked me because of my personality and I got the job.”

That job was with Manchester United’s soccer schools programme — making Thursday’s fixture a peculiar kind of homecoming. “To come from Lithuania and be given that opportunity was a huge step for me,” he said.

He went on to work with Brentford’s Centre of Excellence and managed Kingsbury London Tigers, then competing in the Spartan South Midlands League, before returning to Lithuania in 2014 for his first head coaching role at Ekranas, a club that went bust the following year. Undeterred, Dambrauskas built his CV across Latvia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary and Croatia, winning league titles in three countries before arriving in Azerbaijan.

Sabah’s route to the Champions League group stage was equally circuitous. Beginning in July’s first qualifying round, they eliminated Welsh side The New Saints, then KuPS and AGF, before edging past Israel’s Hapoel Be’er Sheva in a play-off decided by three goals scored in extra time during the second leg.

Dambrauskas will go head-to-head with United manager Michael Carrick at Old Trafford on Thursday. After that, Sabah face league phase fixtures against Slavia Prague, Borussia Dortmund, Viking, Barcelona, Villarreal, Napoli and Arsenal — a schedule that underlines just how far a Lithuanian game show prize can take you.