How Como 1907 Became Football’s Most Beautiful Idea

The walk to Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia doesn’t have the usual concrete drag of matchday. There’s no endless ring road, no retail park and no hard grey sprawl. Instead, there’s the lake on one side, the mountains folding up behind it and a little pre-match theatre playing out beneath the sort of light that makes everything look slightly unreal.

For the Napoli game – a must-win, might I add – the town had that strange, particular feeling football does so well: beautiful on the surface, tense underneath. Como is too pretty to feel hostile in the obvious sense, but there was still something in the air.

That is the thing about Como 1907. The setting is almost absurdly cinematic, but the club doesn’t feel polished to death. Not yet anyway. Not in the way some football projects do when money arrives and every surface starts to shine a bit too much. There’s still texture and a stadium that feels stitched into the town. And, right now, everyone seems to be looking.

On the pitch, Como’s rise has been sharp enough to turn heads in the traditional football sense. Under Cesc Fàbregas, the club has built something young, ambitious and technically serious, moving with the confidence of a side that does not see Serie A as a ceiling.

But the more interesting part of Como is happening around the football. The club has become a kind of cultural object: part team, part destination, part fashion experiment, part very Italian dream of lifestyle as strategy.

In a game full of clubs trying to become brands, Como has the rare advantage of already being attached to one of the most desirable names in the world. Lake Como does a lot of the heavy lifting before the club has said a word. Rhuigi Villaseñor saw that early. “I’m not going to take credit as if I knew soccer or football beforehand,” he admits. “But what I do know is building a brand.”

The founder of RHUDE and former creative director of Bally, Villaseñor joined Como as Chief Brand Officer with a brief that feels broader than anything football usually allows. His job is not simply to make nice things with a crest on them, but to help build a world around the club with clothing, imagery, hospitality, retail, experience and, ultimately, mood.

“One of the first cities I visited when I was able to leave the United States was Como,” he says. “I know the importance of Como in America and on a global spectrum. The weddings, the aperitivos, the lifestyle, George Clooney, the movies. When I had the opportunity to see the pitch and see the stadium, I just saw the potential.”

That word comes up a lot with Como: potential. Not in a recruitment-department sense, but in the way a designer might look at a house, a street or an old photograph, for instance.

“I saw the opportunity to maximise the beauty of Como in all spectrums,” Villaseñor says, “from tourism all the way down to a single coffee cup.”

This is where Como starts to separate itself from football’s usual lifestyle-brand attempts. Plenty of clubs have made fashion collaborations and plenty have put out glossy campaigns. Como, though, feels different because the lifestyle is not being grafted on from the outside, but already there in the lake, the villas, the boats, the silk history, the tourists, the old-money ease. If anything, Villaseñor’s work has been to make the club fluent in that language.

“I think what we have is freedom,” he continues. “Como [the football club] was established in 1907, but we don’t have the pressure of success that other clubs do. What we have is a blank canvas.”

That doesn’t mean that Como doesn’t have a history, because it does, but not the suffocating mythology of Europe’s superclubs. It has supporters, but not a global fanbase waiting to revolt at every visual experiment. It has a badge, a stadium, a town and a lake. Enough heritage to feel real.

From there, the club has started to behave less like a conventional football institution and more like a small but ambitious luxury house with a team attached. There are adidas kits, RHUDE collaborations, sailing references, retro lines, local dialect, destination merch, hospitality ideas and a broader retail universe that seems to understand a simple truth: not everyone who buys into Como will know the left-back, but they will know the lake.

“As good as a football match can be, it’s like the refrigerator magnet thing,” laughs Villaseñor. “I always compare it to the LA Dodgers hat or the New York Yankees hat. There is something to be learned from other countries: if you look within the city and the beauty of the city, you can rely not only on success on the pitch, but on creating something for the community.”

The caps Villaseñor mentions long ago escaped sport and became symbols of place, belonging, or sometimes simply a good-looking object. Como wants a version of that. A cap in a random far-flung country. A shirt on someone who has never checked the score.

“One day, you’re going to be at an airport somewhere – maybe in the furthest part of the world – and you see a couple of people in the line with a Como hat on, and you ask, ‘Do you like the football team?’ And they say, ‘What?’ That is the idea.”

In less careful hands, that might sound like football being diluted into merchandise. But the best thing about Como is that it has not yet lost the local grain. On matchday, for all the famous faces and fashion-adjacent curiosity, it still feels like a town’s club. The lake may sell the dream globally, but the stadium keeps it from floating away.

Villaseñor seems aware of the tension, so much so that he talks about it less like a marketer and more like someone trying not to ruin the thing he came to celebrate. “For us, it’s about humility,” he continues. “One of the things I do is ride my Vespa. I made sure not to ship any of my LA cars here. I wanted to be with the people. I wanted to know what everyday people enjoy, and what they take pride in about Como.”

The global gaze is useful, but it can also flatten a place into content. Too much polish and the club becomes a moodboard. Como’s success so far has been in understanding that the rawness matters. “Curiosity plus authenticity equals what we’re doing right now,” he says.

It helps that he does not speak about fashion as some magic ingredient being sprinkled over football. If anything, he sees it the other way round. Sport came first. Style has always borrowed from it.

“In fashion, we look so much at sportswear as a reference because sportswear is designed the way Formula One designs cars,” he says. “It is performance-driven: how do we bring the best performance out of someone, whether that is sneakers, aerodynamics, clothes or fabrication? Fashion takes from the archives of that.”

His point is that football does not need fashion to make it interesting because it already has emotion. What fashion can do, though, is frame those things differently and push them into new contexts.

“Authenticity wins everything,” he repeats. “You have to lean into what is authentic. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. I know sport. I know the beauty of fans and emotions, and they’re all in the same parallel universe.”

Of course, all of this becomes easier when the team is good. The danger with any “project” club is that the culture talk starts to feel like cover for the football. Como has avoided that because the sporting rise is real. The beauty of the place gets people in the door; the football gives them a reason to stay.

Still, the more radical idea is not that Como might become successful, it’s that a club outside football’s usual elite might build a sustainable cultural universe around itself without waiting for decades of trophies to validate the work.

“Sport is tapped into something deeper than consumerism,” Villaseñor continues. “Fashion has an emotional pull, but not like sport. Sport almost saves lives. It gives hope. It gives people the drive to be better. Fashion is trying to sell you a dream. Sport is giving you the dream.”

That, really, is why Como works. It is not just selling Lake Como with a badge attached, it’s turning the club into the meeting point between the dream and the place: the match and the aperitivo, the terrace and the curva, the local and the global.

On a final note, when Villaseñor is asked to describe the world he is building, he does not bury the ambition. “I think it’ll be the first luxury sports brand. An actual luxury football brand.”  

It is a bold line, but then Como is a bold idea. A football club on one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, moving up the table, dressing well, thinking commercially, behaving culturally, and trying to prove that the future of football does not have to look like another superclub megastore.

Maybe one day, in an airport far from Lombardy, someone really will be wearing a Como cap without knowing the score. And maybe that will be the point.