\n<\/p>\n
It’s undeniably difficult to overstate the importance of Fabregas to the Como project. The club has other notable shareholders such as Thierry Henry, but Fabregas is the frontman, the face of the entire enterprise, Como’s “CEO of football”, as Suwarso puts it.<\/span><\/p>\n “He is crucial for executing the plan that the board has given him,” <\/span>he told the <\/span>Gazzetta dello Sport<\/em><\/i>. “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. <\/span><\/p>\n “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.”<\/span><\/p>\n Right from the start, <\/span>the owners made it clear to Fabregas that they wanted to see a team playing “front-footed football”<\/span>. 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. <\/span><\/p>\n 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. <\/span><\/p>\n “When I first arrived, there were 1.6 million tourists,” <\/span>he explained.<\/span> “Five years later, it\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n “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. <\/span><\/p>\n “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.<\/span><\/p>\n “If you walk around the city today, you\u2019ll start seeing a lot of our merchandise, whereas three years ago, we didn\u2019t even have a store. Now, we have four stores in the city and 485 retail points distributing our products across the province of Como. <\/span><\/p>\n “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.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s undeniably difficult to overstate the importance of Fabregas to the Como project. The club…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}