How Sabah coach Valdas Dambrauskas went from Lithuanian game show to Champions League history

One of the most fascinating stories to come out of the early phases of this year's UEFA Champions League competition involves newly-formed Azerbaijani club Sabah FK and their mercurial coach.

Valdas Dambrauskas has led the young club to not only its first-ever top flight title, but now their first-ever trip to the league phase of any European competition, let alone the Champions League.

Sabah became one of the final league phase qualifiers in the 2026/27 competition as they reversed a 2-1 aggregate deficit to Hapoel Be'er Sheva in the final qualifying round, winning the second leg 5-2 in a stunning comeback. Trailing 4-3 on aggregate heading into stoppage time of the second leg, Tellur Mutallimov scored in the 94th minute to send the match to extra-time, where they would win the game with a pair of goals in the added period.

That sent Sabah to the lucrative league phase, which has changed the trajectory of the club forever.

Dambrauskas has one of the most eclectic stories in modern football history, a sort of rags-to-riches type of rise from his appearance on a Lithuanian game show to the grind of trying to make a career in football coaching out of essentially nothing.

The current manager of Sabah FK is Valdas Dambrauskas, a 49-year-old Lithuanian who has previous experience at big Eastern European clubs such as Zalgiris, Ludogorets Razgrad, Hajduk Split, and Omonia Nicosia among many other sides.

In 2014, after working in the Lithuanian national team youth setup for a number of years, Dambruskas secured his first senior club managerial role with second-tier Lithuanian club FK Ekranas, before being hired by Lithuanian giants and regular Champions League qualifying participants Zalgiris in 2014. He managed to win every domestic title with the club, including a domestic quadruple in 2016, but a massive slump in late 2017 resulted in Dambrauskas's resignation, bringing his three-year tenure to an end.

He bounced around multiple European clubs until being hired by Sabah in June of 2025. He helped them win their first-ever league title in the 2025/26 campaign, and would later secured a spot in the 2026 Champions League league phase for the first time ever in club history.

How Lithuanian game show launched Valdas Dambrauskas' career

Dambrauskas has a fascinating background, never having played football professionally.

In 2002, a 25-year-old Dambrauskas, then an engineering student, appeared on Lithuania's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (called Sesi nuliai — milijonas, which translates to "Six Zeroes — A Million" in English), winning a prize of 4,000 litas, or approximately $1,000 U.S. dollars.

He used this money to move to England and earn his football coaching badges, beginning his coaching career with amateur club London Tigers, while also working part-time with Fulham , and then Brentford , who were at that time competing in League One and League Two.

Dambrauskas said he would start some days as early as 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, sometimes even before the Tube started running. Eventually, while his resume racked up, the toll that working multiple jobs at one time took began to wear him down.

"I was a gardener, a handyman, doing newspaper rounds at the beginning, also polishing floors in a pub," Dambrauskas told the BBC ahead of the Man United match. "So many jobs. Working in retail, and then as a sports development officer, then a sports development manager, and the central YMCA.

"I was doing two, three, sometimes four jobs."

Eventually, he decided he would have to leave England and return home if he wanted to build a coaching career, because he didn't fit the profile of coach that English clubs were looking for.

"I understood that to be a professional football coach in England and move up, to be a head coach or manager, was impossible," Dambrauskas said in a recent interview with the Brentford media team. "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. In England, I was already in a good position. I had a great job, I had finished university, so things were picking up and it was a nice situation."

Dambrauskas said he, his wife, and two sons packed all their belongings into a minibus and moved back to Lithuania, where he got a job with the Lithuanian youth national team setup, and earned a master's degree from the Lithuanian Sports University.

While this story has gone viral, Dambrauskas says he wishes it was framed differently in public.

"I really would like nobody to know that story about the TV quiz, because they only see that!" he said in the interview with Brentford. "People see: okay, he won it and suddenly now he is the head coach.

"But so many factors, so many people, so many circumstances have to collide to arrive where you want to be. This TV show, of course, had some kind of impact - but it was a very, very small impact. I really believe that, even without this TV show, I would have found a way to go to England anyway."

Sabah FK are located in Masazir, Azerbaijan. The locale is a suburb of Baku, the nation's capital, which resides on the far eastern side of the country on the Caspian Sea.

They play their home matches at Bank Respublika Arena, a 9,000-seat venue that opened in 2014.

The club was founded in 2017, first competing in the second tier of Azerbaijani football that season. They backdoored their way into promotion to the top flight in their first year of existence, finishing fifth in the league but seeing each of the four teams above them in the league either fail to earn a top-flight license or decline promotion.

From there, they would finish in increasing position for for of the next five seasons, finishing second in the 2022/23 campaign. That earned qualification to the UEFA Conference League, where they fell in the qualifying rounds. The same fate would befall them in their next two attempts in Europe, including in 2025/26 when they qualified for the Europa League via a domestic cup title, but could not make it out of the qualifiers.

They would finally win their first league title in the 2025/26 season, earning qualification to the Champions League. It was there they would make a magical run in the qualifying rounds, defeating The New Saints, KuPS, Aarhus, and Hapoel Be'er Sheva in order to reach the league phase of Europe's top competition.