From winning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to managing in the Champions League at Old Trafford: Valdas Dambrauskas' unlikely road

On Thursday night, Valdas Dambrauskas will lead Azerbaijani side Sabah into their first ever Champions League match, away at Manchester United. His presence at Old Trafford is remarkable not only because Sabah were founded as recently as 2017, but because of the journey their coach took to get there. In 2002 he won roughly £725 on the Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and spent the prize on moving to London to pursue a coaching career without ever having played professionally.

• Dambrauskas won Lithuania's Six Zeros – A Million in 2002 and used the money to settle in north London.
• He spent eight years in England juggling pub work, newspaper deliveries and gardening jobs with coaching education.
• His first football job came through Manchester United Soccer Schools, coaching children across the country.
• After returning to Lithuania in 2010, he won titles with Zalgiris before managing in Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Hungary.
• Sabah finished nine points clear of Qarabag last season and beat Hapoel Be'er Sheva to reach the group stage.

The game show appearance that changed everything

Dambrauskas can still rattle off the questions and answers from that television appearance without missing a beat. He recalls that Emil Jannings won the first Academy Award for best actor in 1929, that India publishes the most daily newspapers in the world, and that Lithuania led the planet in electricity production per capita. His family, watching at home, held their heads in their hands at that final answer, but he was right.

The prize was not a fortune, but in early-2000s Lithuania it was enough to buy a flat in his home town. He chose to spend it differently: moving to England with his partner and chasing a dream that from the outside looked impossible. The ambition took root after a work trip to Norway in 2000, when he understood the growing reach of the Premier League and realised his home country offered no route into coaching for someone without a playing background.

Eight years in London: pubs, paper rounds and a first break in football

The couple arrived in an unfamiliar city with no contacts and limited English. Dambrauskas worked in a pub in Muswell Hill, delivered newspapers in the area, looked after children at a nursery school, did gardening work, sold products and operated as a self-employed handyman, often holding several jobs at once while studying sports science and coaching at London Metropolitan University. Their first child was born in 2004, in the middle of that relentless period.

His real entry into football came through the Access to Sports Project in Finsbury Park, where he coached children on Saturday mornings. Soon after, a round of interviews landed him a role with Manchester United Soccer Schools, working with youngsters across the UK and on residential trips abroad. The United badge gave him a confidence his broken English had not allowed until then.

From the Spartan South Midlands League to a return home

Through a university friend he became involved with London Tigers, a community sports organisation. He eventually took charge of their semi-professional team, which played in the Spartan South Midlands League and competed in the early rounds of the FA Vase and the FA Cup. It was his first genuine taste of management at any recognisable level, even if far from the professional game he craved.

He also held part-time roles at Fulham and Brentford and worked as a sports activator for Central YMCA. By late 2010, he felt ready to pursue what had always been the original goal: returning home. He walked away from a settled life and a salary five times larger to become assistant manager at Ekranas, the Lithuanian champions. The decision looked like madness at the time, but he sums it up simply: the biggest risk in life is not taking risks.

Zalgiris glory and a nomadic coaching career across Europe

By December 2014 he was head coach at Zalgiris Vilnius, the biggest club in Lithuania. There he won two league titles and several cups, an achievement that would have seemed unthinkable for a boy raised in the small northern town of Pakruojis who lost his father at eleven. After three seasons he moved to Latvia's RFS, and from 2020 onwards his career became a tour of southern and eastern Europe.

Hajduk Split is like a tattoo you can never remove; it leaves a mark on you forever.

He has managed Gorica and Hajduk Split in Croatia, Bulgaria's Ludogorets, OFI Crete in Greece, Cypriot side Omonia and Hungary's Diosgyor. Constant movement is nothing new in Balkan and Mediterranean football, but it has helped him build an identity as a coach who adapts to wildly different contexts. His strength, he says, lies in understanding the human being in front of him, whether they come from east Africa, west Africa or any corner of Europe.

Sabah in the Champions League: a miracle built in two years

Sabah had been courting Dambrauskas for two years before he finally took over in 2025. The club, founded in 2017, had finished the 2024-25 season 41 points behind Qarabag, Azerbaijan's dominant force. In his first full campaign, the Lithuanian coach overturned that hierarchy: Sabah won the title by nine points and earned a shot at the Champions League qualifiers.

In the decisive playoff they beat Hapoel Be'er Sheva after overturning a deficit in stoppage time, with a crowd atmosphere more fitting for a national team. Dambrauskas praises the stability and facilities of a well-backed club and describes every game against Qarabag as a master's degree. His philosophy is built on bold, front-foot football delivered through a multinational squad that has bought into the approach.

What Sabah have at stake in the group stage

The Old Trafford opener is far more than a symbolic reward. For a club with barely eight years of history, competing in the Champions League group stage brings financial and reputational gains that are hard to measure. The draw has also paired Sabah with Arsenal, the club Dambrauskas watched rise from his university windows on Holloway Road during the invincible years. That January trip to London closes a personal circle as improbable as his entire trajectory.

The coach himself rejects the label of mere surprise package. He wants Sabah to avoid becoming a one-season wonder. At 49, a strong European campaign would place him among the continent's most sought-after managers, but he insists the focus is on discovering who his team really are. All of it, he says, is part of the same truth he has been waiting to uncover since he first started dreaming on a television studio floor in Vilnius.