Few football clubs sell £4,000 branded jackets. Even fewer offer private seaplane experiences alongside match tickets. And fewer still manage to qualify for the Champions League while openly claiming they have ‘no sporting goals’. But Como 1907 is doing all three.
When Indonesian billionaire brothers Robert and the late Michael Hartono acquired the club in 2019, Como 1907, a smalltown team on the shores of one of Italy’s most famous lakes, was playing in Serie D, the fourth tier of Italian football. This past season, under head coach Cesc Fàbregas, the club completed one of the most remarkable rises in modern Italian football by finishing fourth in Serie A, ahead of both Juventus and AC Milan, and earning a place in next season’s Champions League for the first time in the club’s history.
But for Mirwan Suwarso, the Hartono family’s long-time adviser and now club president, on-field success is not really the point. ‘We don’t have sporting goals,’ he tells Spear’s. ‘Sporting goals are not measurable when it comes to running a business. And what we are doing here is running a business.’
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It is a striking thing to hear from a president whose club is enjoying the most successful period in its history, but there is a certain logic. Results are unpredictable, so building a sustainable business around them is nearly impossible. What’s more, when your stadium holds just 12,000 people, there is a low ceiling on revenue from match-day tickets. By comparison, the San Siro stadium, which is home to AC Milan and Inter, holds some 80,000 chanting, flare-toting fans. So Como has sought to create a different kind of atmosphere at its modestly sized and utterly picturesque ground. Recent spectators include the likes of Hugh Grant and Keira Knightley.
The Hartonos did not acquire Como with any grand ambitions, Suwarso says. ‘We initially bought the club to use it as a TV set. We wanted to make documentaries about Italian football for our Indonesian TV.’ It was only when that content drew unexpectedly large global audiences that the family began to sense something bigger. ‘We thought: maybe we should turn this into a business.’
Como 1907: The Disney model
The blueprint, it turned out, was pretty simple. Nobody outside Italy had heard of Como 1907, but everyone had heard of Lake Como. ‘Nobody knew the team,’ Suwarso says. ‘Everybody knew the region.’ So rather than trying to create a football brand from scratch, Como’s owners anchored the club to one of the most recognised luxury destinations in the world and started building from there. It is essentially the Disney model, applied to sport.
‘The football club is the theme park,’ Suwarso says. ‘Merchandise is the T-shirts. Tourism is the cruise division. Our media services is Disney Plus.’
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The commercial results are beginning to show. Commercial revenue grew tenfold in a single year, reaching just over €4 million in 2025. Jersey sales, traditionally the bedrock of club retail, account for just 31 to 38 per cent of Como’s merchandise income. The rest comes from lifestyle collections – many of which are unrelated to football.
At the sharper end sits Curva, the club’s own in-house fashion label, led by Rhuigi Villaseñor, the club’s chief brand officer and founder of Rhude, a premium LA streetwear brand beloved by A-listers including LeBron James and Kendrick Lamar. A quilted leather bomber from Curva goes for €1,500, knitted polos for €300, with sailing collections and lifestyle collaborations rounding out a range that has little to do with football.
‘Lake Como is not a budget destination’
The hospitality side of the business follows similar thinking. Pre-game drinks don’t take place in a basement bar but across five lakeside venues, including a boat moored at a jetty. For those visiting outside the football season, the club sells a private Riva speedboat dining experience for €1,740 and a seaplane-and-boat package for €980.
Suwarso expects a private members’ club in a lakeside villa that operates independently of the team to be one of the fastest growing parts of the business. ‘It has nothing to do with the football club,’ he says. ‘But it’s thriving; we have people who are already signing up [although the official opening date is set to be in October 2026].’
If the project has tilted so firmly towards luxury, Suwarso argues, it is simply because the location demands it. ‘Lake Como is not a budget destination. It has a history of affluence and prestige. We are simply amplifying what Lake Como already is.’
Alongside impressive growth, the losses are significant; around €132 million per the most recent accounts. But, with the backing of shareholders worth a combined $38 billion, no warning signs are flashing just yet. Suwarso aims to break even within two years and is targeting is a €1 billion valuation, up from a current estimate of up to €600 million.
What Como has ‘grasped’, the president says, is that while sport can catalyse an audience, the brand has to do the rest. The location is the most valuable asset the club has. Football? That’s just ‘the way in’.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 100, Click here to subscribe
