Sabah FK: the seven-year-old club whose manager turned a quiz show win into a Champions League debut against Man Utd

Sabah FK will make their Champions League debut against Manchester United on September 10, just eight years after the Azerbaijani club was founded — and the story of how they got there is as unlikely as any in European football.

Established in 2017, Sabah won the Azerbaijan Premier League title for the first time last season and then navigated four qualifying rounds to reach the league phase. Their path included victories over Welsh champions TNS, Finnish side KuPS, and Danish club AGF, before a dramatic play-off against Israeli title holders Hapoel Be’er Sheva. Sabah scored in the fourth minute of added time to force extra time and eventually sealed a 6-4 aggregate win.

Leading the club is Lithuanian manager Valdas Dambrauskas, 49, whose route into coaching is one of the more unusual in the game. In 2002, he won £725 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire — the equivalent of six months’ wages in Lithuania at the time — and used the money to fund his studies at London Metropolitan University, where he took a sports science and coaching degree on Holloway Road.

“From the day I arrived, it was all about the dream to become a football coach,” Dambrauskas told Flashscore in August. “It went in stages. First to learn the language. Then to sign up for the Level 1 Coaching course. Then to the Level 2 Coaching course. Then to gain experience with my first coaching session in youth football.”

Dambrauskas went on to take youth coaching roles at several English clubs, including a spell at Manchester United’s soccer schools — meaning he returns to Old Trafford on Wednesday as an opposing manager. He also credits time spent at Brentford as formative, though he was clear-eyed about his ceiling in England.

“I understood that to be a professional football coach in England and move up, to be a head coach or manager, was impossible,” he said. “With my Lithuanian passport, with the country’s name that nobody can pronounce, with my surname that nobody can pronounce and, on top of that, I was never a professional player. But I knew that my experience from Brentford, as well as my coaching badges, could give me a chance somewhere else.”

That chance came in Lithuania and Bulgaria, where he won titles before joining Sabah and delivering a domestic double in his first season in charge. The club’s Champions League debut against United is the culmination of a journey that began, in part, with a correct answer on a primetime game show more than two decades ago.