How would Como 1907 do it?

When Como looked at the merch revenue of the biggest clubs in the world, Real Madrid included, it came to about €200m to €220m a year. Fashion brands make billions. The most famous shirt on earth is a small business next to a fashion label.

Part of the reason: most of the money from a shirt goes to the kit brand. A club with a Nike or Adidas deal keeps a licensing cut, in effect working as a distributor for someone else's product. That's a good deal for Real Madrid, who would otherwise have to run global production and distribution. For everyone else it's a cap.

So if you set your targets by looking at other clubs, the best you can ever become is Real Madrid's merch number. Como decided not to compare itself to Serie B clubs, or to Serie A clubs, at all.

The question they asked was who they want to become, and the answer was Disney: billions in revenue. Once that's the goal, the answers change. If you're Disney, you need a hotel business, a travel business, a media arm.

So they ask those questions. Open a hotel? No, but the club could manage one. Media? They say they are in talks on three TV productions (club claim).

The Disney map also tells the team what its job is. Como is the brand, and the football club is the theme park. A theme park has to be fun, so the team has to be fun to watch. He calls it playing the Lake Como way, and wants to be the LA Lakers of Italian football. Winning helps, but entertaining is the brief.

When an interviewer pointed out that only a handful of clubs are worth a billion, his answer was to ask how much Disney is worth.

Como is a town of 85,000, and nobody outside it knew the team. Everybody knows Lake Como. So when they started making merch, most of it was about the lake.

The shop sells a hiking collection, a sailing collection, a running club, a racing team. None of it has anything to do with football, and it's the fastest-growing part of the business. He says the football merch might reach €10m and that's it; the Lake Como lifestyle is where the growth is.

The goal is for revenue from outside football to be bigger than revenue from football within three years (club claim).

In Serie B, Como told Adidas not to pay them. Instead, give us your product and let us customise it and do the design ourselves. They wanted to learn the whole supply chain while the stakes were small. They made their own shoes, with Adidas credibility on them. They also made each new shirt last two seasons, so fans didn't have to buy one every year.

Then they tried something. Rhuigi Villaseñor, the founder of the fashion brand Rhude, is the club's chief brand officer. For the last game of their first Serie A season, the fourth shirt carried Rhude instead of a sponsor, priced at €275. He says 2,000 sold out in under a week, with stockists like Harrods asking for it (club claim). The next one sent all the revenue, not the profit, to a children's leukaemia foundation, to see how far the brand could go.

Adidas will never pay a club like Como what it pays Real Madrid. So why don't the smaller clubs make their own products together and split the money?

That became Rhude 4 Fans: fan apparel made with other clubs. Como covers the production and splits revenue 50/50 while it carries the risk. He has named Premier League, Serie A, French, MLS, NBA and Middle East clubs as partners, and Como now runs e-commerce and physical stores for at least one other club (club claim). Its own shop, Curva, sells other clubs' gear, AC Milan, Bologna and Roma included.

Other owners buy more clubs. Como would rather serve them: he calls it a "multi-club servicing model". Small clubs can't afford to make the mistakes Como made, so they can buy what it learned. And if Como serves 20 clubs, a bad season for its own team matters a lot less. It's also how he gets to a valuation close to €1bn: he compares Como to a boutique version of Fanatics, not to a football club.

Uber's first deal on the front of the shirt paid about €750,000, a contract signed in Serie B. The new one is over €10m for the same space, plus revenue share and fees for every customer Como brings in (club claim).

The bigger part is that Como gets to operate Uber in the area: Uber Maseratis in Como, Uber boats on the lake. He expects that to earn more than most sponsorship deals do on their own. Brioni works the same way: Como owns a colour palette, and when Brioni sells it, Como earns.

A normal club sells inventory: a logo, some hospitality seats. Como asks what the partner wants, which is usually customers and reach, and gets paid for delivering them. He tells clubs to stop renting their shop window to energy drinks and sell their own products in it. When a Dutch club said "you can do this because you're Como", he asked what their town makes. Cheese. Then he'd be making cheese.

Only two ticketing platforms served Italian football. Como built a third: tickets, merch, and food and drink in one place, with 5% cashback into a wallet you can spend anywhere.

Holding that money needs a financial licence Como doesn't have, so they brought in a partner who does. The partner pays Como for every new customer the platform brings it. And because the platform isn't just for Como, every other club that uses it brings that partner more customers too.

Lots of people in Como make a living selling souvenirs to tourists. To do that, they have to buy stock and carry the risk. So the club makes made-in-Como products for them and gives them on consignment.

He calls it Como for Como. A quarter of the revenue goes to the shop owners, a quarter to community projects they choose, and half back into the products. It started with a handful of shops. He gave 585 in one interview and over 900 in a later one.

It doesn't make Como much money. What it makes is relationships, and those shops are now where the finance partner puts its payment terminals. The plan is to repeat it in other towns.

The stadium is from 1927 and had about 100 hospitality places. It's right on the lake, with villas behind it. So they rented four villas and a boat for drinks and food before the game, three minutes' walk from the gates. He says that took them to about 1,000 hospitality places, and the top ticket from €80 to €2,500. Fans who had season tickets in the third division still pay what they paid then, and the hardcore end stays around €12 to €25.

He puts ticket revenue at €5m to €6m one season and €14m to €15m the next, without adding many seats (club claim).

Then the style. Modern Italian stadiums try to compete with Tottenham or SoFi, which cost billions, and end up looking like wannabes. Como went the other way: rustic and old, with suites furnished with pieces from the 1700s and 1800s found at flea markets. The match-day food comes from the visiting team's region, so a season of home games is a tour of Italy.

A town of 85,000 doesn't need a big stadium, so the rebuild is planned at about 15,000 seats and €64m, focused on hospitality (club claim). What he wants is six restaurants and a rooftop bar on the lake side, the only restaurants on that part of the lake.

The first question they asked the city was whether it wanted a new stadium at all, and then what would help locals. The answer went into the plan: a community health centre, and cheap space for local businesses priced out of the centre by tourism. Final approval is still pending.

Most tourists come in June and July. The season starts in August. So Como made its own pre-season tournament on the lake, the Como Cup, with clubs like Ajax and Celtic, then Villarreal and Crystal Palace. Around it: Football on the Lake, and a music festival on the lake.

The first one lost money. He expects it to make money once the brand around it grows.

Como owns Destination Calcio, an English-language site about football travel in Italy: which clubs to visit, where to eat, where to go. The next step is to join it with the club's travel division, which sells match packages.

Then sell the same thing for other clubs in tourist cities, like Verona, and produce their souvenirs too. His reasoning: if every Italian club grows, his market is bigger.

Players are the biggest cost, so they have to become the biggest asset. Before a player arrives, there's a plan: he should develop over seven years; we can contract him for five; if we can't renew by year four, we sell, at what value; and how many minutes a season he needs to play to get there.

Examples he gives: a 20-year-old winger bought for €12m with offers near €60m; Lucas da Cunha moved from winger to defensive midfield, bought for €250,000 with offers of €15m (club claim). Football Benchmark valued the squad at €330m in February 2026. Holding a player longer also helps the accounts: his book value falls each year, so the eventual profit grows.

The next step: what business can be built around a player for his home market, beyond putting his name on a shirt.

Data is the top of the funnel. A player then has to fit the playing style, pass a behaviour analysis, a check of his and his family's social media history, and a financial test, before the coaches see him. A recruitment board decides by majority. Data counts for about 60 to 70%; people interpret the rest, and the coach can push for a player the data doubts, within reason.

When the press said Como and another Italian club were after the same player, he called the other club's president: if you want him, take him, and we'll take one of yours. He doesn't see top players as scarce. Five big leagues, 20 clubs each, four centre-backs per club, plus the youth teams. Marc-Oliver Kempf cost €1.5m and led Serie A in aerial duels won (club claim).

Cesc Fàbregas writes a game plan before every match and sends it to the board, then a report after. The data team makes its own prediction separately. The owners know what to watch for, like a striker whose job that day is to pull defenders away, not to score.

He's judged on whether the plan was right and whether the team carried it out. A 0–0 against a team that parks the bus can be a good result if Como created more than expected. He says no result is more important than another, so the club shouldn't be too happy after a win or too down after a loss.

Fàbregas is also a shareholder, so he wins if the club outlives his time there. Succession is discussed openly, for him and for the president himself.

Como loses a lot of money, and he doesn't hide it. His framing: every promotion is a new startup, because costs jump each time. The group's e-commerce business took 12 years. He asks for five.

They set targets the other way round: start from how much has been spent and how much they want to make, then throw ideas at that number until enough of them work. He says he doesn't think in terms of budget limits; people matter more than money, and building things has never been cheaper.

In Europe, he wants no special treatment. He told UEFA that if Como breaks the rules, fine it. And in the Champions League, the club should act like it doesn't belong there: don't overspend, prepare, fight.