A 7,500-seat stadium and a global gamble: Como enter the Champions League with something other than money

I sat in the seventh row of the east stand at the Giuseppe Sinigaglia stadium on an April afternoon, the wind blowing in from Lake Como cold enough to soak through the collar of my jacket. In front of me was a stand of fewer than 7,500 seats, smaller than the training ground of several Ligue 1 clubs I have set foot in over twenty-five years in this trade. And yet on the scoreboard behind the goal, the words "UEFA Champions League" had already been hung up weeks earlier, like a statement that asked nobody's permission.

A club promoted to Serie A just two seasons ago is preparing to step out into the biggest arena in Europe. I have written hundreds of pieces about small clubs, I have sat in Brest, I have watched Bodo/Glimt, and I thought I had become immune to fairy tales. But Como does not tell fairy tales. They tell a colder story: one with a balance sheet, with a brand strategy, with an Indonesian man behind a microphone, and with a ratio I could not forget after leaving the lakeside.

That ratio is 1:8. Como's matchday revenue compared to San Siro's.

To understand why that number is scarier than any defeat on the pitch, you have to place Como exactly where it belongs on the map of Italian football. The city has around 84,000 residents, sits on the Swiss border, and is famous for silk, for yachts, for the lakeside villas that European financiers rent as tax shelters. The city's football club has just cut through the entire tier system of Italian football in only two seasons after promotion. In sporting terms, this is one of the fastest leaps in modern Serie A history. In structural terms, it is an unprecedented gamble.

The context needs to be stated bluntly: Serie A is not a league where small clubs rise through sheer speed. Atalanta needed nearly two decades to touch the Champions League. Sassuolo, with a model praised across Europe, has never once entered this competition. Napoli had to wait for the era of Diego Maradona and then a cycle of enormous investment to return to the top. Italian football operates on a logic of slow accumulation: build the stadium, build the academy, build the relationships, and only then dream. Como reversed the sequence. They dream first, then go looking for the money to pay for the dream.

The man behind that dream is Mirwan Suwarso, the club's president. I have followed many press conferences held by owners of small clubs, and most of them speak in the language of three-year, five-year, seven-year plans. Suwarso speaks a different language. He openly admits that Como's local support base is limited, that this city cannot produce a fan base large enough to fill any serious financial ambition. He does not hide how small the Sinigaglia stadium is. Rather than conceal the weakness, he turns it into the premise for the entire strategy.

That strategy has a name: sell the city, not the club.

In a press interview, Suwarso placed Serie A and the Premier League on the scales in a way few people do. He did not compare television rights, wage bills, or squad values. He compared culture. He spoke about art, about history, about Italian cuisine, about beautiful cities like Lecce and Salerno, and about the possibility of turning those non-football assets into global appeal. This is an argument that would be laughed at in England, but it has considerable real-world grounding in Asia and Southeast Asia, where travellers choose destinations by Instagram rather than by league table.

And the first piece of evidence has already appeared. Como's Champions League opener, against RB Leipzig, was broadcast live in Indonesia on SCTV. An Italian club, playing a German club, shown live to a country of more than 270 million people. That is not a coincidence. It is the result of a strategy designed before the club even had a ticket to the Champions League.

I want to linger on this detail a little longer, because it is the heart of the whole story.

In modern football, there are two ways for a small club to survive at the elite level. The first is the RB Leipzig model: funded by a corporation, buying cheap young players, selling them high, building a data system and scouting talent globally. The second is the Bodo/Glimt model: leaning on a specific local resource — in that case, the distinctive Norwegian playing style and culture — then commercialising it beyond the borders.

Como is attempting a third way. They are taking the city as the product.

This may sound romantic, but look at the financial mechanism behind it. When matchday revenue is locked down by a 7,500-seat capacity, when the local population is too small to generate a steady paying audience, the only route to revenue growth is selling merchandise and rights abroad. Shirts, souvenirs, regional sponsorship deals, international broadcast rights, pre-season tours. None of these revenue streams depend on how many people sit in the Sinigaglia stands on a Sunday afternoon. They depend on how many people in Jakarta, in Bangkok, in Hanoi know the name Como.

This is where the story becomes professionally interesting to me. I was born in Vietnam and work in France, so I read moves like this with two eyes at once. My European eye looks at this and sees a high-risk gamble. No big stadium, no solid local fan base, no top-level history to sell. If the club is relegated, the whole strategy collapses in one season. My Asian eye looks at this and sees an untapped market. Southeast Asian fans do not choose clubs by traditional criteria. They choose by story, by image, by emotion. And Como, with its lake, with the Alps behind it, with its silk streets, is an extraordinarily easy story to sell.

Numbers are never wrong; only the person reading them is sure they are right.

I once made exactly this kind of mistake. In 2026, I published a piece on Kylian Mbappé, then emerging at Monaco, arguing that he was merely a product of a system, that 78% of his expected goals came from passes by Bernardo Silva. The piece reached 2.3 million reads and I believed I was right. A year later, at Luzhniki, I stood among a forest of French flags and watched the boy I had called a fleeting product lift the World Cup. That night I wrote a piece retracting myself. From hating someone online, I learned to read carefully before typing.

That lesson applies directly to the Como case. If I only read the balance sheet, I would immediately conclude this is a project that cannot succeed. But a balance sheet cannot measure one thing: the speed at which a brand spreads in the attention economy. And in the attention economy, a small football club in a beautiful city can hold an advantage that a big club in an industrial city does not.

The role of Cesc Fabregas in this picture needs to be stated clearly, because he is the link most likely to be underestimated.

Fabregas took over the team early in his coaching career. Suwarso says the team's development under Fabregas has been faster than the board expected. This is a more important detail than it appears. When a small club rises through brand and media, the biggest pressure is not financial but temporal. A brand strategy needs to be fed by results on the pitch, and results on the pitch need to be fed by a playing philosophy attractive enough that international audiences want to rewatch it on YouTube. A negative, defensive team, even when it wins, cannot generate the following that Suwarso's business model requires.

Fabregas understands that instinctively, because he was a midfielder at Arsenal and Barcelona, two clubs that sell beautiful football as a global product. When he was playing, he inspired a whole generation of young Asian players to learn how to control the ball in midfield. Now he stands on the touchline, and I have seen something I rarely see in young coaches: he does not try to be a complicated tactician. He keeps things simple, readable, easy to love.

What does that mean technically?

A team entering the Champions League without a correspondingly deep squad must choose one of two paths. The first is to sit deep, slow the tempo, defend low, and try to hold a draw. The second is to accept defeat against stronger opponents while preserving an attacking identity. For a club selling a brand, the second is the only sensible choice. A 1-3 defeat built on attractive combinations has higher media value than a 0-0 draw with ten men behind the halfway line.

But this is also the biggest risk I can see, and I want to say it before anyone reminds me later.

Every time I say "this is a sustainable model", football finds a way to prove I am an idiot.

The problem lies in the cost structure. Revenue can grow exponentially if the brand spreads, but the cost of competing in the Champions League grows arithmetically and cannot be avoided. Wage bills, transfer fees, medical costs, travel costs — all priced to European standards, not Como standards. If the club survives only one season in Europe and then falls back, the brand strategy loses its sporting foundation, and the club returns to its old position with a much larger bill.

This is where I have to argue against myself.

I may have been too excited about the Como story because it is so beautiful narratively. A small city, a lake, a visionary president, a young coach, a European dream. I am a football writer, and I am drawn to narrative structures like this. But emotion is not the enemy of reason; it is the silent analyst. And the silent analyst inside me is reminding me that football history is full of brands built on media without a sufficiently solid sporting foundation, and they tend to collapse faster than they rose.

I think of Leeds United in the 2000s. I think of Anzhi Makhachkala. I think of projects built on faith in the power of image, then dissolved when that image was no longer fed by wins.

But there are three differences that make Como unlike those cases, and I need to state them fully to stay fair.

First, Como is not burning money to buy instant results. They are trying to build a new revenue stream rather than relying on a single owner. The difference between burning money and investing in a brand lies in the payback period. A brand project can tolerate three to five years of losses. An owner-dependent project can only tolerate as long as the owner's mood lasts.

Second, Como has an asset money cannot buy: a city with global symbolic power. This is a structural advantage, not a temporary one. It does not disappear when the club is relegated, and no rival can take it away. A club in Donetsk cannot sell Donetsk. A club in Como can sell Lake Como in every photograph.

Third, and this is the point I rarely see emphasised, Como's model does not compete directly with Europe's giants. It competes with mid-tier clubs in Asia and the Americas for the time and attention of international fans. This is a completely different playground, and on that playground, the advantage belongs not to the club with the most money but to the club with the best story.

Here I have to return to my own history of observation.

In more than twenty years of writing about football, I have watched Asian audiences change the way they choose favourite clubs twice. The first was when satellite television brought the Premier League into every household, and an entire generation grew up with Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool. The second was when social media allowed fans to choose clubs by short video rather than family tradition. The third is happening now, shaped by a generation of fans who buy a club's merchandise without ever having seen them play, simply because they like the shirt colour or like the city.

Based on my experience watching matches both in French stadiums and on Asian streaming platforms, I believe this third generation of fans is the only viable foundation for Como's strategy. And it is also the biggest source of risk. Fans who buy a shirt because of one video can stop buying it because of another video.

So what should be tracked to know whether this gamble is won or lost?

There are four signals worth measuring, and I suggest measuring them concretely rather than emotionally.

The first signal is the number of points Como earn in the group stage. Four points or more will turn the story from "lucky small club" into "small club that knows how to play". This number has a clear threshold and can be verified after each match.

The second signal is the growth rate of followers on social platforms during the Champions League period. If growth exceeds 20% in a single season, the brand strategy is performing as designed. If growth stalls, that is the sign of a good story that does not convert into revenue.

The third signal is news of big clubs approaching Fabregas. This is the signal I follow with particular professional anxiety, because it directly measures how successful the project has become. A coach so successful that bigger clubs come asking is an asset that has risen in value — and an asset on its way out.

The fourth signal is the stadium plan. If Como cannot find a way to increase capacity, the matchday revenue ceiling remains one-eighth of San Siro's, and any brand success will only partially offset the financial gap with direct competitors.

What occupied my mind most after that trip was not the 1:8 ratio. It was a question Suwarso posed by comparing Serie A with the Premier League without using money.

In twenty-five years in this profession, I have heard countless times that football is a business. I have written countless analyses of television rights, wage bills, financial fair play rules. But when the president of a small club stands before the press and says that Italian football's greatest assets are art, history and food, he is raising a question this industry has not answered. If money decides everything, why do tourists still flood to Italy rather than to the cities with the richest English clubs?

I am not sure what the answer is. But I am sure this is the first time in years that a small Serie A club made me take more notes in my notebook than keystrokes on my laptop.

The pandemic podcast taught me that silence is also a form of interviewing. That afternoon I stayed quiet for a long while, looking at the lake and at a stand of fewer than 7,500 seats. I wrote nothing. I only thought that perhaps, in a few years, when other small clubs try to sell their stories to the world, people will cite Como as a starting point.

Or I will have to write another apology piece, like the one I once wrote for a 19-year-old in Monaco.

My prediction, offered so it can be verified: by the end of next season, Como will not get out of the Champions League group stage, but will take at least four points, will post double-digit international follower growth, and will announce at least one regional Asian commercial deal. If all three hold, the model of selling the city instead of the club will have its first piece of evidence.

And if all three fail, I will be the first to sit down and rewrite this entire story, in the voice of a man who was wrong, as usual.