Twenty-four years after a television quiz-show win helped take a young Lithuanian to England, Valdas Dambrauskas is preparing to lead Sabah into the Champions League. His journey, like the club’s, was anything but conventional.
In 2002, aged 25, the Lithuanian appeared on a television quiz show, won 4,000 litres and used the money to move to England. Twenty-four years later, he is a Champions League manager preparing to take Sabah FK to Old Trafford. It sounds almost too perfectly written. But the quiz-show money was only the beginning. The more interesting part of Dambrauskas’ story is what happened after the cameras stopped rolling.
He arrived in England in August 2002 on a student visa, with limited English. He studied Sport Science and Coaching at London Metropolitan University, volunteered in youth football and took whatever work he could find. He eventually coached for Manchester United Soccer Schools, Fulham and Brentford before building a managerial career across Lithuania and several other European countries.
That route eventually led him to Azerbaijan. Sabah, meanwhile, was taking a remarkably short route through football history. Founded in September 2017, the club had existed for less than a decade when Dambrauskas arrived in 2025. In his first season, he led Sabah to its first Azerbaijani league title, another Azerbaijan Cup and a 33-match unbeaten run.
Then came the Champions League qualifiers.
Sabah began with a 4–1 aggregate win over The New Saints and followed it with a 3–0 victory over KuPS. Against Aarhus, they recovered from a 2–1 first-leg defeat with a 4–0 home win. The final hurdle was Hapoel Be’er Sheva.
Sabah lost the first leg 2–1. In the return, Tellur Mutallimov equalised in the 94th minute, sending the tie into extra time. Sabah eventually won 5–2, completing a 6–4 aggregate victory and securing their place in the Champions League league phase.
The club was founded in 2017. Its manager had started his coaching journey in England after winning money on television. Now they were heading to Old Trafford.
The first door
Dambrauskas never had the conventional beginning of a football coach. He did not grow up playing organised football and never built a career as a professional player. Watching the 1990 World Cup, however, had convinced him that coaching was what he wanted to do.
The opportunity to pursue it arrived in an unlikely form. In 2002, Dambrauskas appeared on Šeši nuliai – milijonas, a Lithuanian television quiz show often compared with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He won 4,000 Lithuanian litas, around €1,160 at the time.
He used the money to travel to England.
That detail has become the most memorable part of his origin story, but Dambrauskas himself has suggested it can be overemphasised. The money helped open the door. It did not determine what happened on the other side.
England was where he began turning an ambition into a profession.
He studied at London Metropolitan University and volunteered with youth football. He worked with the Access to Sports Project in Finsbury Park and later became involved with London Tigers, progressing from volunteer work to managing the first team in the Spartan South Midlands League.
Away from football, he worked as a gardener and handyman, delivered newspapers, polished pub floors and took retail and sports-development jobs. While raising two children, he sometimes held several jobs at once.
None of those jobs would make for an obvious football biography. But they were part of the period in which he was trying to establish himself in a new country and find a place in the sport he wanted to coach. Then came a significant opportunity.
In 2004, Manchester United Soccer Schools took him on. He spent five years coaching residential courses before moving into academy football with Fulham and Brentford.
The environment was changing. So was his football education. His experience in England would become one of the foundations of a coaching career that eventually took him around Europe.
The long way through Europe
After England, Dambrauskas returned to Lithuania and began working through different levels and football cultures. His career took him through Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Hungary before he arrived in Azerbaijan.
The geography tells part of the story, but the more important detail is the accumulation of experience. There was no single appointment that suddenly transformed him into an elite coach. His career developed through different jobs, countries and football environments.
By the time Sabah appointed him in the summer of 2025, he had already spent more than two decades building that experience. Sabah was at a different point in its own development.
The club had finished second in Azerbaijan in 2022/23 and entered European competition for the first time. In 2025, it won the Azerbaijan Cup. Dambrauskas arrived soon after. The timing mattered.
He was joining a club that had already demonstrated that it wanted to move beyond being a relatively new presence in Azerbaijani football. Sabah, in turn, were getting a coach whose career had been built around moving between different football environments and finding opportunities outside the obvious pathways.
Their first season together produced the club’s first league title and another Azerbaijan Cup. Then the Champions League qualifiers turned an ambitious season into something historic.
A club building its history in real time
Most Champions League clubs arrive carrying decades of history. Some have spent generations collecting trophies. Others have stadiums filled with memories of famous European nights long before the current players were born.
Sabah have almost none of that inherited history. The club was founded in 2017. Their Champions League appearance therefore represents something different. Sabah are not returning to a stage they once knew. They are reaching it for the first time while still writing the early chapters of their own identity.
UEFA describes them as the youngest club ever to reach the Champions League league phase. That makes their qualification more than an unusual entry in a competition draw. It is a marker of how quickly a football institution can develop.
And it gives Dambrauskas’ appointment a different context. He was not simply taking an established club back toward a familiar level. He was working with a young institution trying to discover how far it could go.
The quiz show was never the story
This is why the quiz-show anecdote is so effective. It gives the story a beginning that needs almost no explanation. A 25-year-old wins money on television. He uses it to get to England. Twenty-four years later, he is preparing for the Champions League. But the prize money did not create the career. It created an opportunity. What followed was education, volunteer work, lower-league football, academy coaching and a succession of jobs across European football.
The same distinction applies to Sabah. Their Champions League place did not come from one extraordinary result. The Hapoel comeback was decisive, but it came after three previous qualifying rounds and the domestic success that put them in position to enter the competition in the first place.
The 94th-minute equaliser was a moment. The journey was much longer. That is the connection between the coach and the club. Neither arrived through the route most readers would expect.
Back to Old Trafford
For Dambrauskas, the destination carries an additional layer. He has previously visited Old Trafford with his children. Now he is returning as a Champions League manager.
The significance is not simply that he will be standing inside one of football’s most recognisable stadiums. England was where much of his coaching education began. Manchester United Soccer Schools was one of the early institutions that gave him an opportunity.
Now he arrives with Sabah. A club founded nine years ago will walk into Old Trafford alongside a coach whose own football story began in England more than two decades earlier. The symmetry is there, but it does not need much embellishment. The stadium is the same. The circumstances are not.
Dambrauskas’ route to this point involved no professional playing career and no straightforward rise through the biggest clubs. Sabah’s route involved no century-old identity or European pedigree. Both had to establish themselves before they could become visible at this level. And now both are.
What came after the opportunity
The easiest version of this story begins and ends with the quiz show. That is what makes it memorable: the detail is strange enough to sound like a piece of trivia. But the actual story is the 24 years between the quiz-show appearance and the Champions League.
It is the move to England. The university degree. The volunteer work. The lower leagues. Manchester United Soccer Schools. Fulham and Brentford. The years spent moving through European football.
For Sabah, it is the nine years between being founded and reaching the Champions League league phase. Those timelines eventually crossed in Azerbaijan. The result is a coach and a club entering the biggest competition either had previously only approached from a distance. The quiz show makes for a better anecdote. The long road is the story.