Sabah manager Valdas Dambrauskas will complete a remarkable rise from game show contestant to Champions League manager when he makes an emotional return to Old Trafford to face Manchester United on Thursday.
Dambrauskas’s Azerbaijani club are making their debut in the league phase of Europe’s elite club competition just nine years after they were founded.
Sabah’s rapid development into a team able to share the stage with three-time European champions United is incredible in its own right.
“We have reached a level that is sometimes beyond maybe our imagination,” Dambrauskas told reporters in Manchester on Wednesday.
Sabah are the youngest club to ever reach the Champions League and Dambrauskas said: “We are only nine years old. We never qualified for the Conference League, we never qualified for the Europa League, we never passed two rounds in a row in previous years and now suddenly we are in the Champions League.
“Imagine you come to a tall building, 12 floors and there’s no lift and you are taking the stairs.
“You cannot suddenly go from the first floor to the fifth, you have to go to the second floor, the third and so on, but somehow we came into the building and put ourselves at the very, very top.”
If Sabah might be feeling a little vertigo after their dizzying climb, the story of their manager’s ascent to the Champions League stage is straight out of a Hollywood movie.
Dambrauskas had much to mull over on the flight to Manchester as his mind drifted back to where his coaching career began with a job at Manchester United Soccer Schools over 20 years ago.
Aged 25, the Lithuanian appeared on the television game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” in his homeland in 2002.
He won just over £700 on the show and used the money to help fund his first coaching courses.
Together with his wife and children, he moved to England and enrolled on a sports science course at London Metropolitan University.
– ‘Celebrating on the plane’ –
In 2004 he took the job with United and spent five years on coaching courses held in the UK and across Europe, before later spells with Fulham and Brentford.
“I came a long time ago, 2002, my first job in coaching was here with Manchester United Soccer Schools,” the 49-year-old said.
“Maybe it was not based at Old Trafford but it’s still the name, the badge, it’s something I’m really proud of and now I come to play as a head coach in the Champions League for a club which is very young.”
At the same time that Dambrauskas was learning his coaching trade, United’s current manager Michael Carrick was established as a key figure in the Old Trafford club’s midfield, winning the Champions League with Alex Ferguson’s side in 2008.
While Carrick enjoyed the fruits of his success, Dambrauskas worked as a shop assistant, delivered newspapers, worked in a kindergarten and later as a private childminder to fund his coaching dream.
His first managerial position was with amateur team Kingsbury London Tigers before spells as a professional boss in Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Hungary climaxed with his move to Sabah in 2025.
Dambrauskas led Sabah to the Azerbaijan Premier League title last season.
They defeated Hapoel Be’er Sheva in this season’s Champions League play-off round, setting up Dambrauskas’s fairytale evening in Manchester.
“Yesterday when we boarded the plane, that’s the date this club was established in 2017 yesterday exactly. When we got on the plane we were celebrating the birthday of the club,” he said.
“And for the club and myself making the debut in the Champions League main phase is really amazing and to play Manchester United gives it even more symbolism.”
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