A 119-year-old football club on the shores of one of the world's most beautiful lakes just qualified for the Champions League. Football is only part of the story.

Como 1907 was founded in May 1907 by a small group of football enthusiasts inspired by a match played on the shores of Lake Como between members of a local rowing club and the gatekeepers of Buffalo Bill's travelling circus. The club's home, Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, has sat metres from the water's edge since 1927.

The great Italian football journalist Gianni Brera once called it the most beautiful stadium in the world because of where it stood.

Como's setting was always the story and Djarum Group understood this from the off when they acquired the club in 2019. 5 million tourists pass through Lake Como every year, making it one of the most photographed destinations in the world. This sits as the backdrop to every home match. What Mirwan Suwarso, the ownership group's president and creative driving force, saw was a blank canvas that most established clubs could never offer. 

A place with cultural cachet so deep that the football club sitting inside it could become something far larger than a football club.

Almost every football club approaches brand building as a wider marketing function. The team performs, results drive attention and the brand follows. Como 1907 made a decision that inverts that logic entirely. As Suwarso has stated publicly, the ownership group views Como not as a football club with a brand, but as a brand that happens to have a football club inside it. 

Lake Como is the master brand and the football team is the entry point.

That view shapes everything that has followed. When the club's social media began building an audience after the 2019 takeover the content looked nothing like a football club's feed. It read like a travel account. Focusing on the unique architecture of the town and the aesthetic of Italian lakeside life. The football arrived within that world rather than leading it, which meant that people who had never watched a Serie A match were following Como 1907 because the account made them feel something about a place.

That's a rare and unusual piece of brand strategy and set the tone for what followed.

Como 1907 appointed Rhuigi Villaseñor, founder of luxury streetwear label RHUDE and former creative director of Bally, as Chief Brand Officer. His framing of the role is precise. "This is more than just slapping a logo on a jersey. We're building a lifestyle, something bigger."

The first public expression of that vision came at RHUDE's Spring 2025 show at Villa d'Este on the shores of Lake Como. The Rhude x Como kit that followed sold out and generated significant attention across fashion and football simultaneously, which is exactly the territory the brand is working to occupy. 

The adidas partnership has extended that creative language further with the 25/26 third jersey, guided by Villaseñor and designed to function as comfortably in everyday life as on a match day. As Suwarso has stated, the vision is to elevate Como into a brand that inspires and influences across industries not just sport.

What Como 1907 has built extends well beyond kits and social content. The ownership group has launched SENT Tourism, a dedicated football tourism operation offering curated matchday experiences and lakeside hospitality packages built around the club and its location. 40% of the club's ticketing revenue now comes from international visitors, a figure that reflects how completely the brand has separated itself from the traditional local club model.

The Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia is being redeveloped by architecture studio Populous with the dual objective of creating a UEFA-compliant venue and a 365-day cultural destination rather than a matchday-only facility. 

Cesc Fàbregas as head coach brings footballing credibility and global recognition whilst having Thierry Henry as shareholder and consultant adds a layer of cultural authority that operates independently of league position. 

The people around the club are part of the brand system as much as the visual identity.

In May 2024, Como 1907 returned to Serie A for the first time in 21 years after finishing runners-up in Serie B. In their first season back in the top flight, under Fàbregas, the club finished 10th and established themselves as one of the most talked about sides in Italian football. In May 2026, in only their second season in Serie A, Como finished 4th and qualified for the UEFA Champions League for the first time in the club's history. For a club that had not competed in European football since 1980, the achievement is historic. But the brand story running alongside it is equally significant. 

The lifestyle identity and creative appointments, the tourism infrastructure and content strategy, all of it has developed in parallel with the footballing rise. These are not separate decisions. They are expressions of the same vision.

Suwarso described the club's ambition simply. "We're not just hosting fans. We're inviting the world to live football through the lens of Como: stylish, soulful, and uniquely Italian."

A town football club of 84,000 people on the shores of a Lombardy lake has just qualified for the Champions League and the brand they've built around it has made Como 1907 one of the most talked about creative identities in football.

Shot of the good stuff.