No Lithuanian team has ever qualified for the group stage of a UEFA competition. The closest any team has come is Zalgiris in 2014. The giants of Lithuanian football – title winners in the last four successive seasons – made it to the playoff round of the Europa League. There they were hockeyed by RB Leipzig 7-0 over two legs. Tackling the same tournament, FK Trakai are hoping to go one better than their domestic rivals. Before they can think about the playoff round, they have to navigate their way past Macedonian side KF Shkëndija, another team looking to pop their group stage cherry. They also fell at the final hurdle last year, smacking the floor hard in a 6-1 aggregate defeat to Gent.

Trakai’s budget is a third of Zalgiris’s but doubt them at your peril. They have a habit of triumphing against the odds. Formed in 2005 in the country’s semi-professional Sunday league, Trakai quickly climbed through the ranks. In 2011, they won the third division and climbed to the second tier. By 2014, they were in the top flight.

As Trakai press officer Aurimas Budraitis tells Bleedin Deadly, that’s when things got interesting. “We changed almost the entire team. Our head coach was Edgaras Jankauskas – he won the Champions League as a player with Porto. Now, he is the head coach of the Lithuanian national team. In our first season in the top division, we got a fourth placed finish and a ticket to European qualification.”

Their debut European campaign was bittersweet. Valdas Urbonas, a manager who had won the title five times with Ekranas, came in as head coach. The team was ‘playing beautiful football’ and earned finished as runners-up domestically in 2015. In the Europa League, they overcame Faroese semi-professional outfit Havnar Bóltfelag in the first round but lost to Apollon from Cyprus in the second. 2016 saw Trakai crash out in the first round, making this year’s run the most successful European campaign in the club’s short history.

Budraitis hopes that the example of smaller countries like Slovenia and Iceland can spur Lithuanian football on to greater things. “You know, for many years the government of Lithuanian football said that Lithuania is a little country, so we can‘t be strong football country. However, Slovenia and Iceland are examples of how little countries can reach good results.” Gheorge Hagi, now the owner and chairman of Viitorul Constanta, told the Guardian that UEFA is accountable for holding back Eastern countries with their unfair format ahead of the club’s own qualifiers in the Champions League.

Should Trakai make it past Macedonian side KF Shkëndija and reach the playoff round, they could face a giant of world football like AC Milan. This would be interesting for reasons beyond the David and Goliath angle. Trakai and Milan academies have a collaboration contract. Budraitis points out that Trakai’s away jersey has the same colours as the famous Milan strip. While a meeting would be a ‘fantastic occasion’, nobody at the club is getting carried away yet.

Yet it’s hard not to dream.

“No Lithuanian team in history ever reached the group stage,” Budraitis said, reminding readers of the opening paragraph. “And we understand that this point is very very far. Nobody speaks about it, but everyone is dreaming about it. Silently. Three years ago, when Trakai came to A Lyga, our president said that after 3 years we must go to the 3rd round. Nobody believed it. The Scottish team (St. Johnstone, who Trakai defeated 3-1 on aggregate in the first round) spoke about a big victory, fans were looking for tickets to Sweden. Before the game against (Swedish side) Norrkoping, almost nobody in Lithuania believed in us. But the team believed. And it‘s important. Can we go further? Everything is possible.”