It was enough to win Dambrauskas about £725 in his appearance on Six Zeros – A Million, the Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “At that time it was quite big money,” he says. “I could have bought a flat in my home town; it was a very difficult period there and they were almost free. But my plan was to go to England and follow my dream to become a coach, and that’s how it started.”
The money he won helped Dambrauskas and his girlfriend, now wife, to move to north London and establish themselves in an alien environment. “I would have done it anyway – the show came in the middle of our planning,” he says of the move, which became an ambition after a work visit to Norway in 2000.
In Scandinavia he had grasped the extent of the Premier League’s incipient popularity. “I realised this was where real football is. There was no pathway to coaching in Lithuania if you hadn’t been a player; it was impossible. But if I could take a course in England, maybe I could get a chance to step on the ladder at home.”
Dambrauskas spent eight years in London. “The start was very, very difficult. I wasn’t speaking decent English, had no contacts, we didn’t know anyone, we lived in different places, did all kinds of jobs.” He worked in a Muswell Hill pub, delivered newspapers in the area, held down jobs in a nursery school, as a gardener, in sales, and as a self-employed handyman, often simultaneously. The hours were relentless but so was the young man’s focus.
The Access to Sports Project, based in Finsbury Park, is a stone’s throw from Arsenal but galaxies away in another sense. It is where Dambrauskas landed his first coaching role, giving sessions to children on Saturday mornings and during school holidays. His next step is all the more remarkable for what has passed since. A round of interviews with Manchester United Soccer Schools brought the chance to work with youngsters around the country, and sometimes on residential trips abroad, under the banner of the then serial title winners. Despite the name it was a far cry from even academy football, but the injection of confidence was transformative.
“It was John Shiels, CEO of the Manchester United Foundation, who gave me the chance. I don’t know what he saw in me – I came in with very broken English and couldn’t express myself as I can now – but he really supported me. At the end of the year he wrote me an appraisal of what I’d done. He said that I was good and could do much more. It was a massive, massive boost for me.”
Through a friend at university, Dambrauskas became involved with the community sports organisation London Tigers. “He told me they always needed coaches.” Eventually he took charge of their semi-professional team, which played in the Spartan South Midlands League. “That was where it really started, coaching at some kind of level.” It meant managing in the FA Vase and the early rounds of the FA Cup.
Dambrauskas also undertook part-time roles at Fulham and Brentford before working as a sports activator for Central YMCA on Tottenham Court Road. He would later take a broader role as sports development manager at London Tigers and took his coaching badges at the London Football Association. “It was a time with no holidays, no days off. I’m a big reader, I read all the time and studied constantly. Sometimes I would finish my university work on the bus. I took every kind of education I could and went to every possible course for every meeting.
“Over the years I had countless interviews for coaching roles, for jobs at centres of excellency in London and outside, so many CVs and applications, but I understood early on that it’s very difficult in England to get on the ladder and that to coach at professional level there was probably impossible. If there is a story where someone is starting in the community scheme and going all the way to become a head coach, I am still to find it.”
“I’m forever grateful to my wife for being behind me. We always faced questions: twenty- or thirtysomething guy always studying, trying to work in football, spending all his money on books and courses rather than buying an apartment or something for the family. But I’m very happy with how it turned out and nobody questions those decisions now.”
Dambrauskas was not content to stop there. “You are basically nobody and suddenly you get this job. Then you have to prove yourself to everybody again and again and again. So you reached this step on the ladder but what’s next? How do you go to the next level?”
After three years he joined the upwardly mobile Latvian club RFS but harboured concerns about the prospects of leaving the small Baltic football bubble. In the event he need not have worried. Since 2020 he has managed in Croatia with Gorica and Hajduk Split – the latter are “like a tattoo you can’t ever take out, it leaves a mark on you” – in Bulgaria with Ludogorets, in Greece with OFI Crete, in Cyprus with Omonia and with the Hungarian club Diosgyor, who he describes as having “one of the biggest hidden football potentials in Europe”.
Itinerant career paths such as that are, especially in eastern and southern Europe, nothing new. But Sabah had been courting Dambrauskas for two years before he took over in 2025. Once the stars had aligned, he worked a miracle. In 2024-25, Sabah had finished 41 points behind the biggest club in Azerbaijan, Qarabag. Last season Sabah beat them to the title by nine points, earning their crack at the Champions League qualifiers. “I’m really grateful to Qarabag. Every game against them is like taking a master’s degree.”
“What is important in east Africa can be completely different from what someone needs in west Africa or anywhere across Europe. You need to be able to understand different cultures, different traditions, different ways of speaking or behaving. Without that it’s impossible to do anything, and I believe this is where my strength lies.”
It is a glorious piece of circularity that Dambrauskas and Sabah will be watched from the stands on Thursday by a number of his old colleagues from Manchester United Soccer Schools. He beams at the thought; none of this could have seemed remotely attainable during their time on the grass together. “But I had this belief. I had this confidence all the time that I could do it.”
He is equally delighted that the draw has also brought a January visit to Arsenal, that huge presence in his eyeline during those years studying on Holloway Road. He is 49 and would surely lever himself among Europe’s most sought-after coaching properties if he can take Sabah further. “We’re going to respect everyone but not be afraid of anyone. There’s a very nice song by the Lithuanian band Colours of Bubbles called Truth or Dare. Very soon we’re going to find out the truth about ourselves and what we can do. It will be very beneficial for us because I don’t want this club to be a one-day wonder.” As final answers go, it may be his most significant yet.