10 Things to Know About Surprise Debutants Sabah, Azerbaijan’s Champions League Newcomers

When the 2026/27 Champions League league phase draw was made in Monaco, most of the 36 names on the board were familiar. One was not. Sabah, a club from a town of roughly 19,000 people outside Baku, had come through four qualifying rounds to reach the biggest club competition in the world for the first time.

This article covers who Sabah are, how a club founded in 2017 ended up drawn against Barcelona and Arsenal, the strange story of the manager who funded his coaching badges with quiz show winnings, and the practical details people keep searching for: the stadium, the squad, the money, and why there is a second, completely unrelated Sabah FC in Malaysia.

It is written for anyone who saw the name on a fixture list and wanted more than a one-line explanation.

1. Who are Sabah FK, and where are they actually from?

Sabah are based in Masazir, a town about 30 miles north of Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. The Caspian Sea is on one side, the Iranian border a few hundred miles down the coast on the other.

The club’s official name is Sabah Futbol Klubu. You will see it written as Sabah FK, Sabah FC or just Sabah. Their nicknames tell you a lot about the identity they have built: Bayquşlar (The Owls), Tələbələr (The Students) and Qara-çəhrayılar (The Black-pinks), after a kit colour combination that is genuinely unusual in European football.

The badge features rays of sunshine inside a shield. In modern Azerbaijani, the word sabah primarily means “tomorrow”, though it carried the older sense of “morning” and still does in the standard greeting sabahınız xeyir.

2. Sabah were founded in 2017, which makes them younger than the format they are playing in

The club was formed on 8 September 2017. Their first Champions League league phase fixture fell within days of their ninth birthday.

For context, that means Sabah did not exist when Leicester City won the Premier League. They did not exist when Qarabağ, the other Azerbaijani club to have reached this stage, played their first Champions League group game in 2017/18.

3. How did Sabah get into the Azerbaijan Premier League in the first place?

This is the part of the story that gets skipped in most coverage, and it is the strangest bit.

Sabah entered the football pyramid in the 2017/18 season in the second tier, the Azerbaijan First Division, and finished fifth. That should have been the end of it. Instead, all four clubs above them either failed the licensing process or declined promotion, and on 12 May 2018 Sabah were granted a licence for the top flight.

They won their first Premier League match 1-0 against Keşlə on 12 August 2018, through a goal from the Ukrainian forward Marko Dević, and finished their debut season seventh.

4. How did Sabah break Qarabağ’s grip on Azerbaijani football?

For most of the past decade, the Azerbaijan Premier League has been Qarabağ’s. They had taken 11 of the previous 12 titles going into 2025/26.

Sabah ended that. They finished the 2025/26 season top of the 12-team league with 78 points from 33 matches, winning 24, drawing six and losing three, scoring 75 goals and conceding 25. The title was mathematically confirmed on 30 April 2026 when Qarabağ lost 2-1 to Neftçi. Two weeks later, on 13 May, Sabah beat Zira 2-1 to win the Azerbaijan Cup and complete a domestic double. It was their second cup in a row.

That title is what put them into the champions route of Champions League qualifying, and everything since follows from it.

5. How did Sabah qualify for the Champions League league phase?

The hard way. Sabah entered at the first qualifying round in July and had to win four two-legged ties to reach the league phase. They were the only club in the 2026/27 edition to come through from that starting point.

Their route:

• First qualifying round: The New Saints (Wales), 4-1 on aggregate
• Second qualifying round: KuPS (Finland)
• Third qualifying round: Aarhus (Denmark), losing 2-1 away before winning 4-0 at home
• Play-off round: Hapoel Be’er Sheva (Israel), 6-4 on aggregate

The play-off comeback that sent them through

The Be’er Sheva tie is worth knowing in detail. The first leg was played at a neutral venue in Romania for security reasons, and Sabah lost it 2-1.

The return leg on 25 August 2026 was moved from their own ground to the Tofiq Bahramov Republican Stadium in Baku, where roughly 30,000 turned up. Sabah went behind after ten minutes, equalised before half time through Nwachukwu, fell behind again on the hour, and levelled through Umarali Rakhmonaliev. Then, in the fourth minute of stoppage time, defender Tellur Mutallimov scored to force extra time. Orphé Mbina and Joy-Lance Mickels added two more in the extra period for a 5-2 win on the night.

Their manager summed up the scale of it afterwards by pointing out that Sabah had never before qualified for the Conference League or Europa League proper, and had never won more than two rounds in a row in any European competition.

6. Who is Sabah manager Valdas Dambrauskas?

Dambrauskas is a Lithuanian coach, born in Pakruojis in January 1977, who never played professional football above his country’s third tier. He is the first manager from the Baltic states to take a club into the Champions League league phase.

His route into the game is genuinely unusual. In 2002, aged 25, he appeared on the Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and won 4,000 litas, around £725 at the time, which was roughly six months of average wages in Lithuania then. He used it to move to London on a student visa.

From newspaper rounds to Old Trafford

What followed was eight years of stacking jobs while chasing coaching qualifications. He has described working as a gardener, a handyman, a newspaper deliverer, a pub floor polisher, a retail assistant and a sports development officer, sometimes three or four of those at once, while raising two children.

He enrolled at London Metropolitan University in 2004 to study sports science and coaching, volunteered with a community sports project in Finsbury Park, and worked his way up at London Tigers until he was managing their first team in the Spartan South Midlands League. He was also taken on by Manchester United Soccer Schools in 2004, spending five years coaching residential courses, followed by spells at Fulham and Brentford.

13 trophies across five countries

He went back to Lithuania at the end of 2010 as an assistant at Ekranas, then took over Žalgiris Vilnius, where he won two league titles, three cups and two Super Cups, including a treble in 2016. After that came RFS in Latvia, Gorica in Croatia, Ludogorets in Bulgaria (another league title), Hajduk Split (a Croatian Cup, their first trophy in a decade), OFI in Greece, Omonia in Cyprus and Diósgyőr in Hungary.

Sabah, which he joined in the summer of 2025 on a three-year contract, is his tenth club. The double in his first season took his career trophy count to 13 across five countries.

7. Where do Sabah play their Champions League home games?

Not at home, strictly speaking. Sabah’s usual ground is the Bank Respublika Arena in Masazir, which holds fewer than 9,000 and does not meet UEFA’s requirements for this level.

Their league phase home matches are staged at the Baku Olympic Stadium instead, roughly an hour’s journey away in the capital. Qarabağ have used the same solution for their European campaigns.

What is Sabah’s away support like?

Modest, and the club is honest about it. Flights from Baku to most of Europe are long and expensive. The most-shared example came during the play-off round, when a single Sabah ultra travelled alone from Baku to Bucharest, met the team at their hotel and put on a one-man firework display with pink flares. The players, by all accounts, had no idea he was coming.

8. Which teams did Sabah get in the league phase draw?

Under the 36-team league phase format, each club plays eight different opponents, four at home and four away. Sabah’s draw is about as heavy as it gets for a debutant.

At the Baku Olympic Stadium: Slavia Prague, Borussia Dortmund, Barcelona, Napoli
Away: Manchester United, Viking, Villarreal, Arsenal

Two trips to England carry an extra layer for Dambrauskas, given that his coaching career began at Manchester United’s soccer schools and that one of his London Metropolitan University buildings on Holloway Road overlooked the Emirates Stadium.

9. Who are Sabah’s key players?

The squad is a mix of Azerbaijani internationals and imports from across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and Central Asia. A few names to know:

• Joy-Lance Mickels, a Rwanda international forward and the club’s record goalscorer, with 72 goals in 139 appearances by the end of the title-winning season. He scored 19 league goals in 2025/26.
• Tymoteusz Puchacz, a Polish international left-sided player whose previous clubs include Union Berlin, Trabzonspor, Kaiserslautern, Holstein Kiel and Plymouth Argyle.
• Tellur Mutallimov, the Azerbaijani defender whose stoppage-time goal against Hapoel Be’er Sheva kept the qualifying run alive.
• Umarali Rakhmonaliev, an Uzbekistan international midfielder.
• Veljko Simić and Orphé Mbina, a Serbian midfielder and a Gabonese forward who both contributed heavily to the title and qualifying campaigns.

Squads change every window, so treat any list as a snapshot rather than a fixed lineup.

10. How much money does reaching the league phase earn Sabah?

A lot, by Azerbaijani football standards. Under UEFA’s distribution model for the 2026/27 cycle, every one of the 36 league phase clubs receives a fixed participation payment of €18.62 million before a ball is kicked.

On top of that come value pillar payments, which factor in a country’s broadcast market and the club’s coefficient, plus a ranking bonus based on final league phase position. Azerbaijani outlet İdman.Biz calculated that even on the minimum shares (€935,000 from the European component, €346,000 from the non-European component and €275,000 as the lowest ranking bonus), Sabah are guaranteed something in the region of €20.18 million.

Individual results add more. Each league phase win is worth around €2.1 million under the current structure, with a smaller payment for a draw. One point worth noting: clubs that win the play-off round do not receive the separate consolation payment given to clubs eliminated at that stage, because they move into the centralised distribution system instead.

Prize money figures are reviewed by UEFA across distribution cycles, so the exact numbers will shift over time even though the structure (fixed fee, results bonuses, ranking bonus, value pillar) has been stable.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Sabah FC from?

Sabah FK are from Masazir, a town of roughly 19,000 people around 30 miles north of Baku, Azerbaijan. They play domestic matches at the Bank Respublika Arena there and move to larger venues in Baku for European fixtures.

Is Sabah FK the same as Sabah FC in Malaysia?

No. They are entirely unrelated clubs that share a name. Sabah F.C. in Malaysia is based in Kota Kinabalu, plays in the Malaysia Super League, is nicknamed The Rhinos and traces its roots back to the North Borneo Football Association founded in 1950. The Azerbaijani Sabah has no connection to it.

Why are Sabah called the Owls?

Bayquşlar, meaning “the Owls”, is the club’s best-known nickname, alongside Tələbələr (“the Students”) and a reference to their black and pink kit. The student nickname sits alongside SABAH, the name of a state-run programme in Azerbaijan for high-achieving university undergraduates.

Have Sabah played in Europe before?

Yes, but never at this level. They played in the Conference League qualifying rounds in 2023/24 and 2024/25, beating RFS and Maccabi Haifa before going out to Partizan and St Patrick’s Athletic. In 2025/26 they lost a Europa League qualifier to Celje, dropped into the Conference League, beat Petrocub and were eliminated by Levski Sofia. Before 2026/27 they had never won more than two European ties in a row.

Are Sabah the first Azerbaijani club to reach the Champions League group or league phase?

No. Qarabağ got there first, reaching the group stage in 2017/18 and the league phase in 2025/26, where they beat Benfica 3-2 in Lisbon for Azerbaijan’s first ever win at that stage before losing the knockout play-off to Newcastle United. Sabah are the second Azerbaijani club to make it.

Who is Sabah’s all-time top scorer?

Joy-Lance Mickels. The Rwanda international had 72 goals in 139 appearances across two spells by the end of the 2025/26 season, comfortably clear of anyone else in the club’s short history.

How many trophies have Sabah won?

Three major honours as of the 2026/27 season: the Azerbaijan Premier League title in 2025/26, and the Azerbaijan Cup in 2024/25 and 2025/26.

What to watch for next time Sabah play

If you are tuning in to a Sabah match for the first time, ignore the badge on the other shirt and watch two things: how high they press in the opening 20 minutes, and what happens after they concede.

Dambrauskas built the title win on a side that scored 75 and conceded 25 across a 33-game league season, and the Be’er Sheva play-off showed the trait that matters most at this level. They went behind twice, equalised twice, and found a goal in the fourth minute of stoppage time. Their own president credits the coach with instilling that refusal to abandon the game plan.

For fixtures, kick-off times and confirmed venues, UEFA’s club page for Sabah is the most reliable source, since Azerbaijani clubs regularly switch stadiums for European nights and third-party listings often lag behind.