How Cesc Fabregas' Como went from a €1 million to a €1 billion valuation in fewer than 10 years

A few years before 'Welcome to Wrexham' first premiered on FX in 2022, Suwarso and some of his colleagues at Mola TV - one of Djarum's subsidiaries - had an idea for a "sort of football documentary" set in Italy.

"We thought it would be a familiar theme for the audience, given Serie A's immense popularity in Indonesia during the 1990s," Suwarso told Calcio E Finanza.

The only issue was where to film, as Italy's most populous cities presented all sorts of logistical issues. However, it was while exploring Milan that Suwarso came across Como; "a happy coincidence", as he put it.

On the face of it, Como 1907 looked like an odd choice for the target audience, given the Lariani had hardly been a major force in Serie A's heyday. Furthermore, while the club had just been promoted to Serie C1, the cracks in Como's infrastructure were quite literally there for all to see.

"We are going to renovate the entire building," Suwarso said during a video presentation that featured footage of the club's dilapidated stadium, "and return it to good condition."

It was, thus, already clear: Suwarso had found the potential rags-to-riches story he'd been seeking.

Money was never going to be an issue for Como - the Djarum Group was led by the Harton brothers, Budi and Bambang, two of the richest men on the planet. The real challenge would lie in figuring out how best to invest that money.

Suwarso may have been familiar with Serie A, but he had no experience of running a football club. Consequently, he turned to former England and Chelsea midfielder Dennis Wise for help.

At the time of the takeover, the Londoner was involved in an Indonesian youth development programme run by Djarum and he initially began working with Como as a consultant, before later becoming CEO, and then president.

"I took total control of the football club, from top to bottom, employing every single person in the building," Wise later revealed to The Coaches' Voice. "When I went there, the club didn't even have their own training ground, just a year-by-year lease. In fact, they had gone bankrupt twice and crowds were only around 800.

"So, it was about improving supporter numbers, the community around the club, getting a training ground and creating an academy, which had been outsourced, so we had to bring it back in.

"There wasn’t too much interest from afar at that stage - and Mirwan left me to my own devices, really. I never had much to spend in the transfer market, so I had to try to do some really good deals. We had 14 loans at one stage – it was about filtering in and out, because there wasn’t money to spend. Then, all of a sudden, it started to grow."

By 2021, Como were back in Serie B for the first time since before their second bankruptcy four years' previously. The following summer, in the clearest demonstration to date of the owners' ambitions, Cesc Fabregas joined the club - both as a player and a shareholder. Unsurprisingly, Wise played a pivotal role in bringing the World Cup winner on board.

"Dennis was the most convincing [of the club directors I spoke to]," the veteran midfielder explained at the time. "I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to join a project that excited me. I see a long-term future for this club."

Fabregas, Wise and Suwarso all had the same objective: to get Come back into Serie A, and, in 2024, the team was promoted to the top flight for the first time in more than two decades.

By that stage, Fabregas was looking after the first team. He may have been technically listed as Osian Roberts' assistant but that was only because the former Arsenal ace had yet to secure all of his coaching credentials. Everyone knew, though, that it was Fabregas calling the shots and the full extent of his influence only became clear when Wise parted company with Como in the summer of 2024 and explained his surprise exit by stating, "The club has decided to follow Cesc Fabregas' direction."

Wise also later claimed that Suwarso wanted to "take more control" of the club and "not within the same financial structure". "It was right for me to step away from certain things I don't agree with," Wise added.

Fabregas and Suwarso, though, remained perfectly in sync. "We share the same vision, the same goal, which is to get as high as possible," the Spaniard said. "We are still a small club - but with big, very big ambitions for the future."

Basically, Como weren't simply content to compete in Serie A, they wanted to win right away - and that meant spending more money.

According to Football Benchmark, the club's operating costs (€52m) were more than five times their operating revenue (€10m) during their promotion-winning season in Serie B, and they continued to splash the cash upon arriving in Italy's top flight. The net transfer balance at the end of their first year was just over -€93.35m. Last season, it was almost -€108.79m.

Como's thought process was clear: you have to speculate to accumulate. And it's a strategy that has paid off for them, at least until now, with Fabregas leading the team to a shock fourth-placed finish last season that even took his bosses by surprise.

Suwarso has insisted, though, that Champions League qualification wasn't imperative to balance the books, that the club wasn't under any financial pressure to qualify for Europe.

"We don't set specific sporting targets," he told Calcio E Finanza. "We try not to think that way. We view everything in terms of profitability. If we manage the budget correctly and keep it within a sustainable level, we believe we can be profitable within two to three years."

It's certainly a possibility, given the way in which Como are going about building their brand.

"If you look at the accounts, Como is a loss-making club at the moment, but I would say that's quite normal in the circumstances," Antonio Di Cianni, director of Advisory at Football Benchmark, tells GOAL. "This is a different model to the one we normally see in football.

"Djarum didn't buy an already established football club with high revenue streams. This is a club coming from the lower leagues and they've essentially built a new club from the ground up.

"They've had a net loss of almost €200 million over the past three seasons, but they've secured promotion, and now qualification for the Champions League.

"Obviously, the stadium is small, so capacity is a problem, but they are revamping it. They want to improve the facilities, to make the stadium more state-of-the-art, but also increase the capacity to between 15 and 17,000, which would accommodate more hospitality seats, and that's where the real money comes from a matchday perspective for football clubs.

"Perhaps most importantly of all, Como are doing a lot in terms of merchandising and licensing to exploit the Lake Como brand. Lake Como is well known everywhere in the world, like Venice or Cinque Terre. It has that level of prestige and prominence.

"Past owners didn't take advantage of that fact but now Djarum are unsurprisingly doing everything they can to tap into that brand. They have even set up a private members club (The Club On The Lake) that has a membership fee of €4,500 per annum.

"So, they are trying to cultivate this exclusivity concept around the football club."

Attracting so many celebrities certainly helps enhance that image. In the past 18 months alone, Hollywood stars such as Hugh Grant, Michael Fassbender, Adrien Brody, Kiera Knightly, Kate Beckinsale, Jeff Goldblum, Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh Jackman have shown up at Sinigaglia.

Interestingly, Suwarso says that these weren't PR stunts organised by the club. "We haven't done anything like that," he insisted last year. "They come on their own.

"For instance, James Righton, Keira Knightley’s husband, wanted to visit Como after reading about how Cesc Fabregas was building an exciting football team, so he wanted to see it for himself. From there, everything else followed naturally."

It's undeniably difficult to overstate the importance of Fabregas to the Como project. The club has other notable shareholders such as Thierry Henry, while Raphael Varane is on the board, but Fabregas is the frontman, the face of the entire enterprise, Como's "CEO of football", as Suwarso puts it.

"He is crucial for executing the plan that the board has given him," he told the Gazzetta dello Sport. "Unlike other teams, we don't just rely on the coach and sporting director; we have an expanded football board that includes Cesc and his staff, as well as all other components of our football management, plus our CFO and myself representing the ownership.

"We try to make decisions as a committee, using the DNA we have built as a guideline. But Cesc has been fundamental in building that DNA."

Right from the start, the owners made it clear to Fabregas that they wanted to see a team playing "front-footed football". The objective wasn't so much to win, but to entertain. And the reasoning was twofold: firstly, to attract players to the club; secondly, to attract tourists.

Como's stadium may be small, but so too is the city, which has just over 82,000 inhabitants. What Como has a lot of, though, is visitors and Suwarso's goal all along was to turn Sinigaglia into one of the area's main tourist attractions.

"When I first arrived, there were 1.6 million tourists," he explained. "Five years later, it’s 4.8 million. So, there must be a way to generate revenue from this increase in visitors, and I like to think of our business model in a way similar to Disney.

"For Disney, Disneyland represents its theme park division; for us, the football club and the matchday experience are our 'theme park division'. Then, we have eight other divisions connected to this... But what makes us unique is the way we connect the football experience with tourism in Lake Como, creating a one-of-a-kind synergy.

"We even have schools and an academy - not just a youth sector for the club, but an academy for those who want to play football in the summer, for example, coming from the U.S. Parents can go on vacation while their kids play football. Also, even when we were in Serie B, we sold tickets in 122 countries. Last year, 20 percent of our e-commerce sales were from abroad, and this year, 12% of our sales have come from the U.S. alone.

"If you walk around the city today, you’ll start seeing a lot of our merchandise, whereas three years ago, we didn’t even have a store. Now, we have four stores in the city and 485 retail points distributing our products across the province of Como.

"We are serving a population of 85,000 people, plus the 4.8 million tourists who visit every summer. Our goal is to expand internationally and transform those 4.8 million seasonal visitors into 48 million, 400 million, or whatever realistic number we can reach. If we succeed, it will be extraordinary because achieving profitability in just eight years is incredibly fast."

Como obviously aren't there yet, though. For all Fabregas' qualities as a coach (and he clearly has many), the club understandably remains quite reliant on the transfer market to create a competitive squad, as it will be some time before the revamped youth sector starts producing homegrown talent - which also explains why Como aren't yet making very much money from player sales.

Consequently, they are still some way off achieving the desired €1bn valuation - which, according to Football Benchmark, would rank them fourth among Serie A clubs, behind Inter (€2.1bn), Juventus (€1.84bn) and AC Milan (€1.8bn), but above Napoli (€967m).

"Owners obviously always aim high, it's their own asset, it's in their interests to talk positively about increasing the value of the club," Di Cianni says. "But Como, in 24-25, they generated approximately €50m in revenue, so they're some way below even Italy's highest earners.

"Of course, they will play in the Champions League this season, and while it depends how far you go, I would imagine that they would get maybe between 30 and 40 million euro just by participating. Therefore, they could maybe approach something like €100m in revenue this season.

"Even then, though, a one billion valuation is an ambitious target, because there are no guarantees in sport and it remains to be seen how consistent they are in terms of sporting results. Will Como become a stable side in Serie A, regularly challenging for the top four? Are they now going to qualify for Europe every year? What happens if they have one bad season and fall back into Serie B? These are the questions from a sporting perspective that affect the value of a club.

"From an asset perspective, though, the revamped stadium and all of the activities they are doing to increase revenues, it's all moving in the right direction, moving towards increasing the value of the club, and the squad.

"I think player trading is going to become a bigger part of their strategy going forward, in terms of balancing the books, which is very important from a UEFA licensing requirements perspective. Just look at the fact that, as of today, the combined market value of Como's players was €584.2m - up from €288m last September - and that figure has increased thanks to a significant revaluation of many players, as well as the addition of summer signings like Moise Kean and Trevoh Chalobah, so, that's the level of escalation we're witnessing at Sinigaglia.

"Clearly, the billion-euro target is obviously not a short-term objective, but in the medium- to long-term, if everything continues to go well, I think it's possible, something that can be achieved at some point, given the synergies at play, and the prestige of the location."

Basically, if the football remains as beautiful as the backdrop, Como's first Champions League campaign won't be their last.