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 for Azerbaijani football

Qarabağ FK has been the solitary flag-bearer for Azerbaijani clubs in the Champions League proper for years. Sabah’s qualification breaks that monopoly. They are now only the second Azerbaijani club ever to reach the Champions League group stage equivalent.

This is only Sabah’s fourth European campaign overall, and their first came as recently as the 2023/24 season. The club’s domestic breakthrough arrived just one season ago, when they won the 2025/26 Azerbaijan Premier League title for the first time.

The youngest club in Champions League history

Every other club that has competed in the Champions League league phase was founded long before the competition existed in its modern form. Sabah was founded in 2017, and their entire existence fits comfortably inside a single player’s professional career.

The nearest comparable situation in recent memory is Como’s rise through the Italian football pyramid. Sabah joins them in the 2026/27 edition as a fellow newcomer, though Sabah’s founding date makes the Azerbaijani club the more historically unusual case of the two.

Their journey from the first qualifying round through four successive ties against opposition drawn from Wales, Finland, Denmark, and Israel is a systematic performance across a compressed schedule that tests squad depth and tactical adaptability in equal measure.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.