Most football clubs spend decades grinding through lower divisions before sniffing continental glory. Sabah FK of Baku needed less than a decade.
The Azerbaijani club, founded on 8 September 2017, officially qualified for the 2026/27 UEFA Champions League league phase on 25 August 2026, becoming the youngest club in the competition’s history to reach that stage. Let that context land: the club is not yet nine years old.
How they got here
Starting from the first qualifying round, the club worked through four separate ties on the Champions Path, dispatching Welsh side The New Saints, Finnish club KuPS, Danish outfit AGF Aarhus, and finally Israeli side Hapoel Be’er Sheva in the play-off round.
That last hurdle was the most dramatic. Sabah went into the second leg of the play-off trailing 2-1 on aggregate, a position that would have ended the run of most clubs making their first serious European push.
