From Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to facing Manchester United in the Champions League

David Sneyd

PICK A FAIRYTALE, any fairytale.

You still won’t find a story with as many strands of sacrifice and inspiration in this season’s Champions League that comes close to Sabah manager Valdas Dambrauskas’ journey to this point.

The Lithuanian was not the man in charge of the Azerbaijani champions when they lost 1-0 home and away to St Patrick’s Athletic in the third qualifying round of the Uefa Conference League in 2024.

There will likely only be two survivors in the starting XI to face Manchester United in their opening game of the league phase at Old Trafford on Thursday night.

Dambrauskas arrived in 2025 and guided the Sabah to the title with a nine-point advantage over Qarabağ FK.

Sabah’s journey is incredible given they were only founded seven years ago. For further context, Dambrauskas is only 49 and already coached in nine different countries.

But that only scratches the surface.

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At every turn his story becomes more remarkable. There would be enough tales to keep the most diligent fact-checker busy.

He moved to England after winning 4,000 litas (around €900) on the Lithuanian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

It was August 2002 (Ireland was still reeling from Saipan and the World Cup while Roy Keane got on with life in Manchester as captain of United) and Dambrauskas arrived on a student visa.

He was 25, and as laid out in a riveting interview with the BBC he spoke little English while also raising two children with his partner. Two years after landing in England his career began to take off.

The London Football Association awarded him a Uefa coaching licence and his experiences were rooted in community, volunteering to coach deprived children in the north London’s Access to Sports Project.

His own education continued with a course in sports science and coaching at London Metropolitan University. He also took charge of the London Tigers, a charitable organisation with teams from youths to semi-professional level.

He got his first break at a professional club when, fittingly, he got an opportunity with the Manchester United Soccer Schools in 2004.

He returned to London for a spell with Fulham. The door was ajar, but not fully open. To support his family, Dambrauskas explained how he worked up to four jobs at a time. He polished floors in a pub, picked up shifts in retail, had a newspaper round as well as a handyman and gardener.

In that chat with the BBC, he cited former Brentford academy director Ose Aibangee as a key influence on his career. This rings true very quickly when Aibangee takes a call from The 42 to explain more about Dambrauskas’ rise from putting on sessions with kids from nine to 12 years old at the west London club.

“We helped and guided as best we could to provide the right environment and culture, but it’s all down to the individual and how they want to progress and get better. Just like we do with players, we can aim to help them develop and improve but 90% of why players become players is because of themselves, it’s the same for Valdas, he is the one who made this happen for himself.”

Aibangee was tipped off by a friend on the coaching scene about the Lithuanian working with London Tigers and went to watch him on the sideline. What he saw was “somebody extremely conscientious and hard-working” and as they worked up close those traits shone through even more. In the couple of years he stayed with Brentford before returning to Lithuania to work with the underage international teams, Aibangee recalls a colleague “completely driven by football, who wanted to be the best regardless of what age group he was working with.”

Aibangee says Dambrauskas was always reading, researching and studying away from the training ground, bringing that enthusiasm with him and “treating the young players with respect, making sure they worked hard and always engaging with them.

“It’s an amazing story but it’s not a surprise something like this has happened for him because he always tried to focus on wanting to be the best and working towards that,” Aibangee says. “He made mistakes, of course, he was inexperienced and learning, but you never had to tell him anything twice.”

The former Brentford academy director believes the focus at that level is always on developing players and individuals rather than simply creating successful teams. “A lot of coaches get too ‘teamy’,” Aibangee says. “Teams ain’t important, it’s the players, we didn’t want our coaches to get too attached to teams.”

That’s certainly an ethos that has stuck with Dambrauskas throughout his career, and after working with his country’s U-17s and U-19s between 2009 and 2012, he has managed club sides in Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Hungary before pitching up in Azerbaijan.

“He will be a different coach to the one I knew,” Aibangee says. “Because he’s no longer dealing with kids, but he has really good people skills and his connection with young players was such that even though they knew they were there to work hard they always respected him.”

That respect is hard-earned, but then nothing has ever come easy to Valdas Dambrauskas as he prepares to take his place in the away dugout at Old Trafford.The hot seat of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? must seem like another lifetime, and only incredible perseverance has made his dreams become reality.