Sabah Baku qualifies for 2026/27 Champions League, makes history as youngest club ever

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. Instead, they won the second leg 3-1 in Baku, flipping the tie on its head and sealing a historic result in front of their home crowd. The win puts Sabah into the league phase of the Champions League as the second debutant of the 2026/27 edition, after Italian club Como. Why this matters...