"I was a gardener, a handyman, doing newspaper rounds at the beginning, also polishing floors in a pub." That's Valdas Dambrauskas — the man currently preparing Sabah for Champions League group games against Manchester United and Arsenal.
Let that sink in for a second. The same person scrubbing pub floors in London is now walking into Old Trafford and the Emirates with a team in European football's elite competition. The gap between those two realities is where the story lives.
Eight years of groundwork nobody saw
Dambrauskas arrived in London in August 2002, aged 25, on a student visa with limited English and a clear-eyed view of his own limitations — he'd known since he was 12 that playing wasn't his path. Coaching was the next best thing, and he pursued it with a focus that bordered on obsessive.
He enrolled in sports science at London Metropolitan University in 2004. He volunteered with deprived kids at Finsbury Park. He worked his way up through London Tigers — a charitable community club — from volunteer to first-team manager in non-league football. He attended every coaching course, every conference, every London Football Coaches Association meeting he could find. He became the first Lithuanian to earn a UEFA coaching licence through the London FA.
And through all of it, he was juggling two, three, sometimes four jobs at once while raising two children.
"Working in retail, then as a sports development officer, then a sports development manager, and the central YMCA," he said. The list goes on. This wasn't a romantic struggle — it was a decade of relentless, unglamorous grind.
Manchester United opened the door
His professional break came when Manchester United Soccer Schools took a chance on him in 2004 — a moment he still credits as transformative. Five years coaching residential courses across the UK and Europe followed. Then a spell at Fulham. Then Brentford, where academy director Ose Aibangee pushed him further than he'd pushed himself.
There's an almost poetic detail to this week's trip back to Old Trafford. And when Sabah travel to the Emirates in January, Dambrauskas will be returning to a stadium he used to stare at from a university building on Holloway Road.
- Dambrauskas arrived in London in 2002 with limited English and no professional coaching experience
- He became the first Lithuanian to obtain a UEFA coaching licence through the London FA
- He worked at Manchester United Soccer Schools for five years before roles at Fulham and Brentford
- Sabah face Manchester United and Arsenal in their Champions League group stage
"When I hear this word 'England', it for me sounds like opportunities," he said. For a betting market perspective, Sabah are heavy outsiders in both fixtures — but whoever is pricing those games probably doesn't know the full CV of the man in the dugout.
"England gave me all this and I'll forever be grateful."
