How Como 1907 Are Changing Football By Acting Like A Startup | OneFootball

The traditional path for a newly-promoted club in a top division is predictable and often fatal. Most organizations scramble to build equity. They hope to find a lottery ticket in the youth ranks who they can flip for enough cash to buy another year of survival. Some make it, some don’t.

Since their promotion to Serie A, Como 1907 have rejected this cycle by building a squad based on immediate utility rather than registration equity. By intentionally signing away the future resale value of their best assets, the ownership group is betting that the presence of elite talent will scale their luxury business faster than any transfer profit. This is not a football team in the classic sense. It is a vertically integrated luxury brand where the players on the pitch act as the primary marketing engine.

To understand the scale of this gamble, one must look at the history of the club. The organization survived three bankruptcies in a single decade. The current ownership is not looking for a quick flip. They are treating the club like a tech startup with the lake as the ultimate master brand, and the football team as the primary attraction that draws the global profile.

The Valuation Gap and the Loss of Agency

The foundation of Como’s strategy rests on a series of negotiations with European giants. The acquisition of Jacobo Ramón is the latest example of this talent over equity trade, but hardly the first.

At 21 years old and standing 6 foot 5 inches, Ramón possesses the rare physical frame that defines modern elite centre backs. His pedigree is equally significant. He anchored the Real Madrid Under 19 side to a treble before serving as a key pillar in the Spain squad that won the 2024 UEFA European Under 19 Championship.

Real Madrid recognized this high ceiling and structured a transfer deal with Como to ensure they never truly lost control of Ramón. By inserting a 50% sell on clause and a tiered buy back reportedly somewhere between £6.7 and £8.4m, Florentino Pérez has effectively turned Como into a high-end development lab. If Ramón fulfills his physical promise and becomes an elite defender, Madrid can reclaim him for pennies. This contractual cage kills any leverage the Italian side has to sell him for a premium to a third party.

We see a similar situation with Nico Paz, also purchased from Real Madrid. On the pitch, the 21 year old has become the most creative playmaker in Serie A. He is the son of former Argentina international Pablo Paz and has already shared the pitch with Lionel Messi for the national team.

Real Madrid sold Paz for £5 million but retained a staggered buy-back that escalates annually and a 50% sell-on clause, effectively retaining half of his economic rights. This tiered structure allows Madrid to reclaim him at set intervals for a predetermined price, which is currently scheduled to reach approximately £7.5m in the 2026 window. Because the Argentine is currently valued at over £50m on the open market, a valuation gap is created. For the club to make a profit on a sale, a buyer would have to pay closer to £70m to account for the 50% cut held by Real Madrid. No rational front office will pay that price when Real Madrid can end the negotiations by triggering their buy back.

But it’s not just Real Madrid feeding Como. This loss of agency extends to the blue side of Manchester as well. Máximo Perrone is a defensive midfielder who joined permanently from Manchester City for £12.5m after a loan spell. He was originally scouted by City from Vélez Sarsfield and is the technical pivot that makes the Como system function. However, Manchester City forced a 30% sell on clause and their own buy back option into the deal. Como owns the registration but do not fully control his destiny. If Pep Guardiola decides he wants the midfielder back, Manchester City can snatch him away.

These types of deals became a foundational recruitment philosophy in Como’s early days of top-flight football. By accepting these terms, the club has partitioned its future. They have began spending more in the market on players like Jesús Rodríguez and Martin Baturina, signed to deals that give the club more control and earning power,.

Every minute of development these players receive increases their market value, yet that appreciation remains locked behind a door to which only the parent clubs hold the keys. Como has skipped the traditional struggle of a newly promoted side by leasing elite talent. The trade-off is a total loss of financial agency. They are building a penthouse on a foundation they do not own, and the eventual bill for that luxury will be paid in talent rather than cash.

the Shift to Vertical Integration

Sacrificing player transfer revenue is a lot easier to do when you have a lot of money – and Como have a ton.

Como’s owners, the Hartono Brothers, are among the wealthiest men in the world and they have injected Como with a massive influx of cash to expedite the rise of the club. Money doesn’t always equal success when it comes to running a football club, and we’ve seen more than one newly-rich club fall flat on their face from ill-advised spending and poor decision-making. But money certainly helps the process and Como have a ton of it.

As long as they are only competing domestically, they are free to spend aggressively, as evidenced by their leading Serie A in net spend this past summer. Italian financial regulations focus on spending versus cash flow, and Como have a ton of cash thanks to their owners. But if their success continues, Como will be destined for Europe where different financial regulation hurdles await them.

The club’s prioritization of talent over transfer profits creates a significant technical hurdle regarding UEFA’s new Financial Sustainability Regulations. In the old era of Financial Fair Play, clubs were measured by the “Break-Even” rule, a three-year look-back at aggregate losses. It was a test of survival. The new era is governed by the Squad Cost Ratio (SCR), which is a test of efficiency. Under this rule, a club’s spending on player and head coach wages, transfer amortisation, and agent fees must not exceed 70% of its total annual revenue.

For most clubs, the primary way to keep that ratio in check is to pump up the revenue side of the ledger with player sales. Profit from transfers is a massive lubricant for the 70% calculation. A mid-table club can afford a top-tier wage bill because they flip a single breakout star for a £40 million profit, instantly lowering their squad cost as a percentage of their total income.

By signing away their sell-on rights and accepting buy-backs for players like Paz and Ramón, Como has intentionally cut itself off from this safety net. They cannot rely on a massive transfer windfall to balance their SCR because the parent clubs hold the keys to the profit. To remain compliant, the club has been forced to grow its commercial and matchday revenue at a rate rarely seen in European football.

But Como were prepared for this. It was all part of their long-term strategy to achieve total vertical integration of the business arms. The owners have moved retail in-house. They grew that revenue by treating their kits as high-fashion items rather than mere sporting equipment. This move allows the club to capture the full margin on every shirt sold, bypassing the middle-man fees that eat into most clubs’ profits.

This control over the ecosystem is vital for a club that cannot rely on transfer sales. They even launched Como Ventures, a startup launchpad testing health tech and luxury travel businesses. This venture arm is designed to be a diversified revenue stream that exists completely independent of whether the ball goes in the net on Sunday.

Yet, for all the sophistication of their start up launchpads and in-house retail, the club eventually has to face a fundamental truth of the sport. While commercial growth provides a stable floor, the true engine for revenue growth is still the performance on the pitch. The massive broadcast distributions and performance bonuses that come with European competition represent the only true way to scale a club’s financial ceiling.

The vertical integration strategy is a clever survival mechanism, but it is ultimately a secondary gear. Despite the focus on building a master brand, the best way to expand the revenue bucket and satisfy the 70% rule is the oldest one in the book: winning.

The Owner in the Dugout: Cesc Fàbregas as the Bridge

None of this recruitment or tactical experimentation would be possible without the unique status of Cesc Fàbregas. Most managers operate on a month-to-month cycle of job security. This makes them risk averse and resistant to development projects that might see a player leave via a buy-back. Fàbregas is a part-owner of the club. This fundamentally shifts his incentives. The former-Arsenal man is a permanent partner whose goal is the long term appreciation of the club’s valuation.

This ownership stake allows him to negotiate with elite clubs as a business peer. He is not coaching for his next contract. Real Madrid trusts the Spaniard with their best prospects because they know the man on the bench has a financial stake in making sure those assets succeed. It also grants him the freedom to innovate without fear.

The repositioning of Lucas Da Cunha is the proof of this leverage. The club analytics models showed the player was a mediocre winger with a low ceiling. Fàbregas used the data to move him into a deep midfield role. He saw technical vision that the computer missed and because the Spaniard is an owner, he could commit to the shift and give the experiment the time it needed to succeed. The result was a total transformation. A player bought for a few hundred thousand pounds is now the club captain with an eight-figure valuation.

A less-secure manager may not take those risks, or embrace the youth movement on the Como roster. Any other manager, coming off of the success Fàbregas has had at Como would be plotting for his next managerial move. And perhaps Fàbregas leaves at some point for a bigger club. But he’s already stayed longer than most would, and as a stakeholder in the bigger project, he has personal incentive to stay and see it through.

Como 1907 is a high stakes gamble that the old rules of transfer equity no longer apply if you can build a strong enough luxury brand. They are building a global institution where the sport is the primary attraction. The business ambition is the true engine.

With an owner in the dugout and a roster full of elite talent they do not truly own, the club has officially changed the rules of the game in Italian football.