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Thanks to the draw with Cosenza, and the simultaneous defeat of Venezia against Spezia, on Friday the Como football team obtained promotion to Serie A, the highest level of the professional Italian football league. He hadn’t been part of it for 21 years.
Como’s promotion was a rather expected result, especially due to its position of economic dominance in the category: it is in fact the richest team in the entire Serie B, and more generally one of the richest in Italian football.
The recent history of the Lombard club changed five years ago, after decades of mediocre results and economic difficulties. In 2019, when it was still playing in Serie D (the fourth division of Italian football), it was purchased by Sent Entertainment, a UK-based media and entertainment company. Sent Entertainment is in turn controlled by Djarum, a large Indonesian tobacco company that produces “kretek” cigarettes, those flavored with cloves, owned by brothers Robert and Michael Hartono.
According to the magazine Forbesthe Hartono brothers (who among other things also have a stake in the main Indonesian bank, Bank Central Asia) are the people richer in Indonesia, and among the top one hundred richest in the world: they manage assets estimated at 48 billion dollars.
The Hartonos have made a series of investments in Como that are beyond the reach of the vast majority of teams playing in the minor leagues, and which concerned not only the members of the team and the corporate structure, but also the structures available to the club.
Como fans celebrate promotion to Serie A at the Sinigaglia stadium
The most notable change in the composition of the team was in the assistant coach, Cesc Fàbregas, who had actually arrived at Como as a player. He is a former Spanish midfielder who played for some of the biggest clubs in the world, such as Barcelona, Chelsea and Arsenal, and won a World Cup and a European Championship with Spain. Como bought him from Monaco in the summer of 2022 on a free transfer, a common method in football which provides that the player’s “price” is not paid to the other team: the contract with his home team was expiring, so the Como should only have paid his salary. His arrival had been widely discussed and commented on by sports newspapers, also because it is rather rare for a player of such great international prestige to choose to end his career in Serie B.
Despite the great hype caused by the arrival of Fàbregas, Como had concluded the 2022/2023 season in 13th place, far from eighth position, the last one that gives access to the playoffs to climb to Serie A. Fàbregas then became the Como coach at the beginning of this season, after the dismissal of Moreno Longo: however, given that he has not yet obtained the necessary license to carry out the profession, he formally appears as assistant to the Welsh coach Osian Roberts.
Como footballer Marco Sala celebrates promotion to Serie A (Marco Tacca/Getty Images)
Another significant change concerned the team’s management and its corporate composition. From February 2021 to November 2023, the sole administrator of Como was the former English footballer Dennis Wise, best known for having played for eleven years for Chelsea, one of the London teams. In the summer of 2022, former Arsenal footballer Thierry Henry also became a member of Como, purchasing 1 percent of the company’s shares.
Also thanks to the presence of two rather well-known former footballers such as Wise and Henry, in recent years several players with some experience in the higher categories have been attracted to the Como sports project. For example, this year’s composition (the so-called squad) includes several players with a recent past in Serie A, such as forwards Patrick Cutrone and Simone Verdi, midfielder Daniele Baselli, defender Federico Barba and Croatian goalkeeper Adrian Šemper.
In recent years Sent Entertainment has also made large investments on other fronts, such as sports facilities and communication activities: for example, last year it purchased a new sports center in Mozzate, about twenty kilometers from Como, and in 2020 it was a special streaming channel has also been created, Como Football Tvwho follows the team day by day.
The idea was to give Como a structure similar to that of the main international clubs. Interviewed and Eleven magazineComo manager Mirwan Suwarso said that, from the beginning, the Hartonos’ objective was «to intertwine all the different areas so that a football club can be sustainable», in order to «transform a football club from a company with a structural loss to a profitable business.”
Furthermore, Suwarso always said to Eleven, in the last six years 50 people have been hired at the club headquarters, as part of a restructuring process which has led the company to be divided into four macro areas: Como Retail, which deals with the management of the sales points; Como Property, dedicated to the renovation works of the Giuseppe Sinigaglia Stadium; Como Academy, relating to the youth sector; and Como Entertainment, which takes care of all the collateral events, parties and appointments.
The value of the brand has also grown greatly since the arrival of the Hartonos. According to Suwarso, in the last five years merchandising sales have gone from generating around 90 thousand euros in revenue to over 3 million, an enormity for a relatively little-known team, which becomes even more remarkable if we consider its recent history, made up mostly of difficulties and failures so frequent that they never allowed her to create a solid bond with her city (like Roma in Rome, Fiorentina in Florence, Napoli in Naples).