After years of Lithuanian football scraping along near the bottom of the European game, there is plenty of evidence of improvement. But a shadow is now looming over the horizon: few countries in Europe have lost as many clubs as Lithuania, where football has consistently struggled in the post-Soviet period.
Part of the problem is the dominance of basketball. Lithuania is ranked among the top ten countries in the world and has won Olympic and World Cup medals. In contrast, the football team has never qualified for a major tournament and the club game has been endemically weak.
Financial vulnerability and poor governance allowed criminal elements into the club game, which has been dogged by match-fixing and clubs routinely failing to see out a season.
Since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, 27 clubs have folded. In 2019, just five sides in the eight-team A-Lyga managed to see out the season, and
