How £725 game-show winnings kick-started Champions League coach's career — SkimNews
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- Valdas Dambrauskas arrives at Old Trafford on Thursday as Sabah's manager in the Champions League, completing a 20-year arc that began when Manchester United Soccer Schools hired him in 2004 as his first professional club coaching role.
- Dambrauskas used 4,000 litas (~£725, roughly six months' average Lithuanian wages) won on Lithuania's 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' in 2002 to move to London at age 25 on a student visa and begin coaching.
- Dambrauskas spent eight years in England juggling up to four jobs at a time — gardener, handyman, newspaper rounds, pub floor polishing, retail — while volunteering at London Tigers and becoming the first Lithuanian to earn a UEFA coaching licence through the London Football Association.
- Sabah, founded in 2017 and based in Masazir (population ~19,000), are the only club to reach this season's Champions League from the first qualifying round, eliminating TNS, KuPS, Aarhus and Hapoel Beer-Sheva after never previously reaching the Europa League or Conference League.
- Dambrauskas has won 13 trophies across five countries since leaving England in 2010, including league titles with Ekranas, Zalgiris Vilnius and Ludogorets Razgrad, and ended Hajduk Split's 10-year trophy drought with the Croatian Cup.
- Sabah are drawn against Borussia Dortmund, Barcelona, Napoli and Villarreal, with English fixtures at both Manchester United and Arsenal — a stadium Dambrauskas could see from his London Metropolitan University campus on Holloway Road.
- Manchester United Soccer Schools chief executive John Shiels and Brentford academy director Ose Aibangee are cited by Dambrauskas as the two biggest career influences who gave him his breaks.
Why it matters: The story reframes a viral feel-good anecdote: the £725 was just the entry fee to a two-decade grind across seven countries and 10 teams, and it now delivers Sabah — a 19,000-population club formed in 2017 that never previously reached a European group stage — into a Champions League group featuring Dortmund, Barcelona and Napoli.
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