A-listers and fashion lines: rise of new kings of Italy

Nur Photo/Getty Images; Eugenio Pingo/Alamy Place to be: 

the Giuseppe Sinigaglia stadium, situated on the edge of Lake Como (left).

Como 1907 are changing Serie A – and all because an Indonesian producer wanted a new TV show, writes Rory Smith

‘It’s like Disney: the stadium is the theme park, 

it’s where you can experience the magic of Como’

   - Mirwan Suwarso, club president

18 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Rory Smith

Certain conventions tend to apply in these situations. As president of Como, the backwater team with the pocket-sized stadium that now find themselves face-to-face with Manchester United in the Champions League, Mirwan Suwarso would be forgiven for wanting to take a victory lap. More than that, in fact: doing so is sort of compulsory.

Ordinarily, for example, he might be expected to explain how everything that he and his colleagues have built since buying the club – adrift in the fourth tier of Italian football – in 2019 has actually been the product of some grand masterplan. Plenty, in his position, would claim to have foreseen their rise to sit among Europe’s elite with ultra-HD clarity right from the start.

Vanishingly few would respond to the stock, soft-soap opener – “How much of what you have achieved was the strategy at the beginning?” – with a breezy wave of the hand and the words: “Oh, zero. None at all.” Even fewer would really stress that everything Como have become is “the result of desperation”.

But that is the story, and stories have always been the suave, bespectacled, refreshingly unguarded 55-year-old’s metier. “We bought the club, originally, for a TV station,” he said. He had run a show in his native Indonesia called Garuda Select, in which a team of Indonesian prospects played against European academy sides. It was a hit. “The ratings were competitive,” he said. “Better than the Premier League.”

Como was supposed to be the sequel: the network would buy the club, import Indonesian players, and then follow their progress in real life competitive games. Except Italy changed the rules on registering players from outside the European Union. They had to pivot. Instead, they appointed an American as chief executive, and built a show around him instead. The American ran for three well-received seasons; ever the pitchman, Suwarso notes that it is still available on YouTube.

But then, as the costs of both operating the club and distributing the show began to rise, the club realised it needed to find ways to make money outside of the relatively paltry broadcast income on offer in Italy’s lower leagues. “There was a limit on our revenue,” he said. “If we wanted to grow, it had to be a business.”

The approach they took has transformed Como: a team that had spent years drifting in obscurity is now a powerhouse in Serie A and a presence in the Champions League; the home of Europe’s coaching prodigy du jour, Cesc Fàbregas; the richest club in Italy and more than once described as the “coolest” on the continent.

But their impact might yet run much deeper than that. Whether by accident or by design, Como might have developed a blueprint that could change – perhaps even save – Italian football.

From the moment he arrived, Fàbregas was cast as the leading character in Como’s sudden rise. That was inevitable: when he joined as a player in 2022, his fame was far greater than the team’s. When he was appointed as manager – first interim, then assistant, and finally permanent in 2024 – their place in the game was effectively sealed: they were Cesc Fàbregas’s Como.

That is not the only way they have intruded on the game’s broader consciousness. The club’s stadium, the Giuseppe Sinigaglia, sits on the shore of the town’s eponymous lake; in the past couple of years, its VIP boxes have become a magnet for passing A-listers.

Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender and Adrien Brody have all watched games there; at one point, Kate Beckinsale offered a glowing review of her excitement at seeing the former Wolves forward

Patrick Cutrone in the flesh, a crossing of streams that would take some time to fully unpack. The Sinigaglia is now well-established as a place to see and be seen.

It goes without saying that is exactly the sort of thing that tends to elicit at least mild tutting from football’s traditionalists. The fact that Como have leaned into it so heavily – offering ticket packages that include yacht or seaplane transfers to the stadium; converting an 18th-century villa next to the stadium into a private members’ club – might also not be to everyone’s tastes.

Suwarso, though, does not believe the club had a choice. As far as he is concerned, Como’s future rests on thinking like and operating as a “premium sports tourism” venture, one in which “football is one attraction” but is very much not the only strand to the business.

His preferred parallel – he recites it so fluently that you suspect he knows it verbatim – is with Disney. Como, as a club, does not have a glorious history or a vast local fanbase or a massive stadium: the Sinigaglia holds only 13,000 or so. To grow, Suwarso said, it had to “piggyback” the global appeal of the lake and its reputation for oldworld, high-end luxury.

Much of Como’s merchandising business, then, has nothing to do with football. There are collaborations with Rhude, the achingly cool streetwear brand run by Rhuigi Villaseñor, the club’s chief brand officer. There are Como Sailing Club collections, Como Running Club collections, and there is – obviously – about to be a Como Padel Club collection. None of those things exist, but like the glimpses of A-listers in the stands, they project the image of the lifestyle associated with Como.

“There is a merchandise arm, the same as Disney,” Suwarso said. “Then you have the media side, the content we create, which is how most people will interact with us, just like Disney. The stadium, coming to a game, is the theme park. It is where you can touch and feel it, where you can experience the magic of Como.”

It is an approach, he believes, that could work elsewhere in Italy. More than that, in fact: it is an approach he is happy to allow his peers, and rivals, to borrow.

Como’s ascent has not been universally popular within Serie A. Many of the criticisms are familiar, frequently levelled against Europe’s suite of ultra-modern capsule clubs: the accusations of superficiality, of Instagram artifice, of an obsession with lifestyle, of everything relying on owners – in this case the billionaire Hartono family – willing to swallow heavy losses.

Some, though, are bespoke. Fàbregas’s Spanish-inflected style of play has not always met with approval; last season, Alessandro Nesta witheringly suggested that the 39-year-old should “fax all of us Italian coaches after his university lectures and explain how we’re allowed to play, so he’ll finally be satisfied”.

And the club’s reliance on imports, too, has been a source of some discontent, particularly given the ongoing travails of Italy’s national team. Como work with Jamestown Analytics, Tony Bloom’s secret-sauce data company, on recruitment; Fàbregas and his assistant, Dani Guindos, have leaned particularly heavily on their contacts in Spain to bring in players to fit their system.

“If there was an Italian and a Spanish player who were exactly the same, we’d sign the Italian,” said Osian Roberts, the club’s Welsh head of development. “The last international break we had eight or nine young players with the Italian national [age group] teams. It’s really important to Suwarso to have a core of Italian players, but we had to build the roof first. We had to build a squad to compete in Serie A and then the Champions League.” Nationality, he said, is not their primary concern.

Much of the resistance, though, appears to be theoretical. Serie A, this season, ranks as the youngest of Europe’s top five leagues. Fàbregas is still the league’s youngest manager but only just, with Ignazio Abate of Torino about five months older than him. Traditionally no country for young men, nine of Serie A’s coaches are now under the age of 45. The style is changing, too; there has, at the time of writing, been just one goalless draw in Italy all season. On the pitch, Como appear to have changed the league, rather than the league changing Como.

Suwarso’s hope is that can apply away from it, too. Como do not want to keep their success to themselves: they are currently working with 24 clubs, across Europe – including two in England – to help them design, produce and ship football-adjacent merchandise lines and capsule collections. Curva, their fashion strand, already sells collections for AC Milan; others are in the pipeline to follow.

The club runs a travel platform, Destination Calcio, to help more Italian sides become sports tourism operators. “Italy has a unique football history and heritage,” Suwarso said. “All these places – Verona, Lecce, Parma – have sightseeing, cuisine, all these things to offer. They’re all tourism destinations. If we all work together, we can all make our businesses stronger.”

This is a break in convention, too; clubs, habitually, do not seek to share knowledge. Speaking to him, it is not a surprise Suwarso does not see it that way.

“The more competitive the league is, the more attractive it is, the more the broadcast revenues go up,” he said. “If we can be collaborative, everyone benefits.”