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Welcome to issue #078 of Contemporary Football, your inside look at how the game really works behind the scenes.
Monday to Friday, you’ll uncover a new perspective on football business, and sometimes a deeper story that sharpens your thinking and gives you an edge in the beautiful game.
If you need support on your football journey, just write me.
Most football clubs begin with the same assumption.
The team is the product.
Win matches.
Grow the fan base.
Sell sponsorships.
Increase revenue.
Everything starts from the pitch.
Como began from a completely different place.
The pitch is not the centre.
The location is.
Como 1907 sits on one of the most recognisable destinations in the world: Lake Como.
Millions of visitors pass through every year.
Luxury tourism.
International visitors.
Global cultural visibility.
Most clubs try to build a global brand from football success.
Como is testing the opposite.
Use a global destination to build the football brand.
The Problem
Mirwan Suwarso explained the starting point clearly.
The city has fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.
The province does not reach one million.
And within two hours you find some of the most powerful brands in football.
AC Milan
Inter Milan
Atalanta BC
Juventus FC
When the new ownership arrived, around 90% of the local population supported those clubs.
That fact forces a strategic decision.
You cannot build a competitive advantage by fighting them on the same battlefield.
History wins that war.
So, Como moved the battlefield.
The Destination Model
Lake Como already attracts global attention.
The strategy is to convert part of that attention into football.
Not by forcing tourism to revolve around the club.
But by inserting the club into the experience of the place.
Someone arrives for a weekend.
They walk along the lake.
They visit restaurants.
They explore villas and towns.
And one afternoon becomes a matchday.
The club becomes a cultural layer of the destination.
Not the destination itself.
That subtle difference changes the business model.
Because the potential audience is no longer just the local population.
It becomes the global flow of visitors passing through the lake every year.
Rewriting the Sponsorship Logic
Most clubs wait for sponsors.
Como flipped the dynamic.
Instead of asking for sponsorship money, they asked something else.
Do you want to build something together?
A good example is the partnership with Adidas.
When Adidas approached the club during their time in Serie B, the deal was unusual.
No payment.
Instead, full access to Adidas products and the freedom to customise them.
That freedom allowed Como to experiment with fashion-style apparel.
The result reveals how the club sees itself.
Only around 40% of merchandise sales come from football shirts.
The rest comes from lifestyle clothing.
The product is no longer only the team.
It is the aesthetic of the place.
The Owners’ Mental Model
The Hartono family, the owners behind the project, come from a very different industry.
To explain football economics to them, Suwarso used a metaphor from dairy farming in an interview with Tuttosport.
First you have the cows.
Then you produce the milk.
In football terms:
Players are the cows.
Value creation is the milk.
Buying a player for €6–7 million and seeing the valuation rise to €70–80 million is the kind of transformation that interests them most.
What does this mean?
Player trading is not treated as a side activity.
It is a core economic engine.
A Different Relationship With Results
The owners want the project to work even if the club never reaches the Champions League.
That sounds almost heretical in football.
But it makes sense once you understand the structure.
Tourists still arrive in summer.
The lake still fills with visitors.
Restaurants and hotels still operate.
The ecosystem continues even when football stops.
This reduces something most clubs cannot escape.
Total dependence on sporting results.
The Experiment
Most football strategies follow a familiar sequence.
Win games.
Grow the fan base.
Monetise the brand.
Como is reversing that logic.
Start from the location.
Build the brand.
Let the football grow inside it.
If the model works, the club’s biggest advantage will not be budget or trophies.
It will be geography.
Because while football clubs compete every weekend, very few clubs sit on top of a destination that already attracts the world.
The question is whether a football club can convert tourism into something more durable.
Not just visitors.
Supporters.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Federico
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