Valdas Dambrauskas can phone a friend. He can maybe even turn around and ask the audience.A former Who Wants To Be A Millionaire contestant in his native Lithuania, Dambrauskas used his winnings to pay for his coaching badges in England. On Thursday, he will walk the sideline to the away dugout at Old Trafford.Sabah, last season’s title winners in Azerbaijan, travel to Manchester United in their first-ever game in the Champions League proper, having overcome The New Saints of Wales, Finland’s KuPS, Danish side Aarhus and Hapoel Be’er Sheva from Israel in four rounds of play-offs.They have already played eight games in the competition since the middle of July in order to play (at least) another eight between now and late January.It is a reminder of the continued eclecticism the Champions League can still occasionally bring, especially in its expanded format, now into its third season.Sabah did not exist as a club a decade ago, only being formed in 2017. Now, improbably, they prepare for further league-phase games against Barcelona, Arsenal, Napoli and Borussia Dortmund, hoping, perhaps, for much more than a reputation as an inconvenient and long away day for Europe’s elite, and aspiring to a shock, like the one everybody’s favourite Transnistrians, Sheriff Tiraspol, pulled off against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in this competition’s old group stage in 2021.The Champions League is not just the establishment. It is new faces such as Sabah, Viking of Norway and Austria’s LASK and, remarkably, Como. Some come in the footsteps of fallen giants; Como, for instance, qualified at the expense of Milan and Juventus, finishing fourth in Serie A. They may now be monied like a lakeside hotel, glittering like the water beyond its terrace and impeccably coached by a once-great player who promises to be the game’s next great coach in Cesc Fabregas, but they were fourth-tier as recently as 2019, and the progress they have made shouldn’t be taken for granted.Fabregas celebrates beating Parma in May (Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Images)Fabregas’ 2026-27 Champions League journey will take the Catalan back to his hometown, as Como play Barcelona at the end of January. Before that, they have Paris Saint-Germain, the back-to-back European champions who like to perform a league phase rope-a-dope act, then liven up in the knockout rounds.PSG aside, finishing top four in the league phase is usually a good predictor of the Champions League’s final four. In the first season of the new format, three of the four teams who performed best from September to January made the semi-finals. Last season, it was two. The outlier in both? Oddly, PSG. In 2024-25, they required a play-off to make the knockouts proper, pummelling fellow Frenchmen Brest 10-0 on aggregrate. Last time, Monaco, another of their domestic rival in Ligue 1, very nearly knocked them out at the same stage.These antics have, fleetingly, left the impression that PSG haven’t got what it takes, or aren’t what they once were.It’s similar to how Madrid — the most recent club to win the Champions League three times in a row (from 2015-18), and the only one to do so in the modern era — tended to confound observers who couldn’t read coach Zinedine Zidane and expected more than off-the-cuff individual brilliance from a champion of Europe.PSG divide less in this regard. Nobody looks at them and asks: “How did they do that?”With Pep Guardiola on sabbatical after stepping down at Manchester City and Jurgen Klopp studying international football as the German national team’s new coach, there is no doubt that Luis Enrique, a double treble-winner with Barcelona (2014-15) and now PSG, is the pre-eminent manager in Europe at the moment. He turned Ousmane Dembele into a Ballon d’Or winner. Five members of his PSG team made the top 10 in the voting for that award last year. None of them are superstars and, as such, they may split the vote this time around.