Lake Como’s Serie A Rise Has Its Club Dreaming of Becoming a Sports Disneyland | OneFootball

On the shores of Lake Como, where legends ebb, fables flow.

In the eventide of World War II, Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian resistance fighters in the lakeside village of Dongo as he fled to Switzerland. The next day they shot him and his mistress against the wall of a villa in Mezzegra overlooking the lake. From there, the fable takes over: Why did they shoot him instead of putting him on trial to atone for the millions of casualties? Some accounts say he was carrying confidential missives from Winston Churchill that could’ve compromised Britain; others say the anti-fascist partisans who made up the Italian resistance wanted to make it a point that it was them, and not the Americans or Soviets or British, that dealt with Il Duce on their own terms.

Even the true name of the lake, Lario, has been lost to legend. As the city of Como rose in popularity with the sojourning elite, the lake took on a name that represented its principal town, which has caused local geographical controversy à la Gulf of America. The monster that lives in the lake’s depths (at 1,435 feet, the deepest lake in continental Europe) is named Larrie the Lariosauro, described by the official state website as “a cousin of the Loch Ness.” Larrie can often be found lurking among Mussolini’s sunken treasure, another fable to say the least.

Then there’s the haunted island of Isola Comacina burned by Barbarossa the Holy Roman Emperor and thus cursed (whoever attempts to take up residence on it dies a violent death). Across from the island is the village of Lezzeno, where you cannot see the sun from December to February and where presumed witches were once burned for practicing their black magic. As so often is the case, history delves into legend and legend bleeds into myth—stories that seem too good to be true but have an inkling of truth that bind them together.

So here’s another one for you: A thrice-bankrupted club is fished out of the lowest rung of Italian professional soccer by Indonesian tobacco billionaires originally looking to make reality TV, turns a star Catalan player without any coaching experience into a global managerial phenom and, within six years glides into the top 10 of one the world’s most competitive sporting leagues. Talk about sunken treasure, talk about magic.

That is the legend of Como 1907, where history waltzes with fable, in a setting known for everything but its sporting heritage.

Some say May 10, 2024, is the day it all came to fruition; others consider it just the beginning. Regardless, it is considered one of the greatest days in Como city history. In 2019, the club floundered in Serie D, Italy’s lowest professional level. Five years later, on that night in May at the lakeside Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, a simple draw would clinch promotion into Italy’s esteemed top flight after a 21-year wait. In 2017 after the third bankruptcy in 13 years, entry into Serie A would’ve been beyond fable—the thought alone bordered madness. And after a 1–1 draw, madness prevailed.

Just as many Comaschi, Como citizens, gathered outside the stadium along the lake as inside the Sinigaglia on that fateful night. Outside during the match, fans held smartphones aloft streaming the game to whomever could see as the stadium’s yells played spoiler. As the sun set, the bar between the stadium and the seaplane club projected the game on a bed sheet. The city shook at the slightest chance. “Games like that, where you're playing for something so important for your club, for your people, are the most beautiful ones to play,” says Patrick Cutrone, Como native and club captain.

When the final whistle blew, all roads by land and by sea led to the Sinigaglia, where the gates opened to all as fans both inside and outside the stadium flooded the pitch in reverie. Boats filled the marina and set off fireworks from the lake. At 11 p.m. families with small children wearing the club’s biancoblu walked the promenade to the stadium to share in the legend.

It wasn’t the drunken chaos of a World Cup victory. It was simply joy and wonder, one of the few times the city could celebrate itself after years of selling its name to luxury tourism and international renown. Last year, more than five million tourists landed upon Lake Como’s shores. But for one night, Como was for the Comaschi.

“That was incredible. It was one of the best days of my life, not only my career,” says manager Cesc Fabregas. “Nobody really expected us to do what we did in a short period of time.”

An Arsenal, Barcelona and Chelsea icon, Fabregas himself is now a Lario legend. His Como journey began in Serie B as his playing career ended, enticed by a contract offering shares in the club. The following season, the former midfielder became his teammates’ manager, a role he could “officially” hold for only one month since he had yet to complete his coaching license. And yet still led them into Serie A as an “assistant coach” pulling the strings behind the scenes. This season is technically his first as manager.

To his players he expresses himself in four languages at any given time, and he speaks them in astute, analytical terms that repel hyperbole. He is always scrutinizing, refining, remembering. So when a man who has won two Premier League titles, a La Liga trophy, consecutive European championships and soccer-starved Spain’s only World Cup tells you a Serie B triumph in a town of 80,000 people ranks alongside the pinnacle of his career conquests and the births of his children, you believe it.

“So many people asked me: Oh, there is football in Como?” Fabregas says. “When I went there, they didn't even know. That’s how far we’ve come, and now all of a sudden be in the top flight, fighting this season to get into the top 10.”

Fabregas has led Como to its first top-10 finish in Serie A since 1986. | Marco Luzzani/Getty Images

With one game remaining, Como 1907 will finish the season in 10th place fresh off a six-match win streak, just the second newly-promoted side to do so in Serie A history. They have defeated three of the league’s top five clubs, including league-leading Napoli. In the last 14 seasons, only two other newly promoted teams have finished in the top 10 in their first season. They have not lost a match in two months.

Having grown up in Como, Cutrone barely remembers the last time Como 1907 was in Serie A. At 7 years old, he joined AC Milan’s academy as Como 1907, then known as Calcio Como, experienced its first bankruptcy. But in 2022—after a career in Serie A, Champions League, the Premier League and La Liga—he opted to return home, to Serie B, in the prime of his career. In his second season, he brought his hometown club back into the top flight as the leading goalscorer, leaving him weeping on the pitch for his city.

“Growing up there was some excitement around the club but much less than now,” Cutrone says. “Now we’ve managed to recreate the feeling from 22 years ago when Como was last in [Serie] A. It’s an incredible feeling, a dream that I have had since I was a kid.”

A night to never forget became a season to remember. For once, fable became legend, legend became history.

Lake Como is both sonata and symphony, at times idle with the ability to melt any heart, then suddenly and extravagantly grand. For that reason, it has always been a playground for the rich and famous, dating back to Roman times. That includes Lionel Messi, who reportedly bought a lakeside villa in Tremezzo in 2014, and who is the protagonist of another Lake Como myth.

The legend started with then owner Enrico Preziosi, who said that a 15-year-old Messi was scouted by the club and even came for a tryout in Como. But his then-$50,000 price tag became too much for a club floating between Serie A, B and C to spend on a teenager who would eventually become the best player to ever play the game. For years, the news was treated as Italian history. Finally, all it took was a call to Barcelona to confirm that Messi never had a tryout and never even went to Como in a footballing capacity. Turns out it was just an attention grab by an owner. At 15 years old and just two years away from his La Liga debut, nothing could have convinced a prime Barcelona prospect to drop down to a small-market team destined for Serie C. But it was too easy to believe because it was Lake Como, where the world’s biggest stars are always in orbit and where life is a work of art.

Though many have tried, oil on canvas cannot do it justice (it was a favorite subject of Churchill, an avid painter), let alone Instagram. Alfred Hitchcock, James Bond and the lake’s most famous denizen, George Clooney, have catalogued it on the silver screen, but Star Wars may have done it best: a faraway planet with otherworldly vistas and boundless idylls.

In footballing terms, the Stadio Sinigaglia is Eden between four chalk lines. To the north, the Alps lean in the distance. In the east, the lake glitters behind the away end. Seaplanes and Switzerland maintain the western front. Towering medieval stone walls behind the stadium close the frame. Yes, it is too good to be true, and that portrait is precisely why the masses have arrived.

Built in 1927 along Lake Como, the Sinigaglia is considered one of the world’s most beautiful stadiums. | Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images

Mass tourism has become Lake Como’s forbidden fruit, turning entire villages into seasonal resorts and leases into Airbnbs at the expense of local life. According to the local Chamber of Commerce, Lake Como tourism is a $1.5 billion industry that employs 10% of the local population. Since the COVID-19 lockdown, every year more tourists have arrived than the year before, with Germans and Americans making up the biggest proportions.

A steady decline in local bars and rental housing followed while the number of restaurants (and their prices) increased. Accommodation skyrocketed by 70%, yet hotels make up only one-third of Como’s lodging. Much like Venice, property owners around the lake took a bite of the tourism apple and handed over the keys to the city. The result: Disneyland in the summer, a ghost town in the winter.

“The desire for immediate profit has led to building [life] upon the quantity of people coming and not the quality of life for people living here,” says Tiziana Lo Castro, a certified Lake Como tour guide. “The opening of all these vacation homes has led to more people than these towns can manage, causing them to empty because prices have soared. People can no longer live in the towns where they were born because they cannot buy a house or find a long-term rental.”

Anyone who lives here will tell you that during the tourism offseason, it’s nearly impossible to find a good meal or an open bar in the evening. Except on matchday, when the city fills back up. Como 1907 is now part of the attraction, and when club president Mirwan Suwarso talks business, the word Disney is frequent.

“It is very, very important for me to build our positioning so Como football club is a premium soccer tourism destination in the world,” Suwarso says. “And to have a premium soccer tourism destination, you have to have your tools. So the football team is your theme park division if you're borrowing the Disney metaphor And then you’ve got to have the vehicle to accommodate and to promote tourism and travel.”

At first glance, comparing your club to Disneyland may not be what most fans want to hear. But for Suwarso, the Disney model is not just a reference—it’s critical to the club’s survival. The club faces a series of unique demographic challenges that in the past has limited its growth. Como is the second-smallest city by population in Serie A with roughly 83,000 residents. Even if the club reaches a saturation point with its local base, it’s not enough to sustain operations in Serie A at this level.

Suwarso’s vision is to build the Como 1907 brand around Lake Como’s international popularity. | Marco Luzzani/Getty Images

And then, there is the question of the population’s split allegiances. In their 118-year history, Como 1907 have only spent 14 of their 118 years in Serie A, meaning fans could root for the local club and a big club without fear of clashing. The city’s proximity to Milan (25 miles) means that most Comaschi are fans of Inter Milan, like the current mayor of Como, or AC Milan. It makes for a fascinating dynamic when they face off now in Serie A, even more so on May 23 when Como 1907 host Inter with the chance to end Inter’s title hopes on the season’s final matchday.

All of this means that Como 1907 must reach for bigger markets. And luckily for them, most of the world comes to them.

“The Disney parallel is important for me, because I think it's the only parallel that actually exists,” Suwarso says. “No sports organization elsewhere has the need for a travel and tourism business. they usually outsource it. But for us, the product doesn't exist. We have to create it.

“Not just have tours coming to us to watch football, because Milan is just around the corner. Inter is around the corner. San Siro is the temple of football. For us, you gotta have the Lake Como experience. That's why people come to Lake Como, to be enticed by its sexiness of it, the beauty of it. So we have to create it.”

As an experienced Indonesian TV executive, Suwarso, 54, has a deep understanding of broadcast rights and revenue. Unless you're in the Premier League, where even the bottom team is guaranteed more than $100 million annually from broadcasting rights, TV money is often considered a birthright rather than house money. He cites the current financial crisis in France’s Ligue 1, where TV rights holder DAZN simply stopped making payments on its $400 million-a-year contract due to low viewership, as a reason to not rely on broadcast money to build a foundation.

The other traditional option to generate revenue is to become a feeder club, curating top talent like 20-year-old Nico Paz (six goals, eight assists) and 19-year-old Assane Diao (eight goals in 15 matches since arriving in January) only to sell them to the highest bidder. But that is no way to build success, Suwarso says.

“You may be lucky once or twice, but it's not a sustainable practice. It's very risky. … So how do you build a legacy based on that business sustainability? It’s important for us to create businesses outside of the playing field. And how do you do that? For us, we quickly understood that Como the club and Como the city have to be the same.”

The ambition to build an international brand from scratch is a relatively new idea for the club’s leadership. In 2019, Indonesian billionaire brothers Robert Budi ($22.4 billion net worth) and Michael Hartono ($21.5 billion net worth) purchased Como 1907 after the club’s third bankruptcy as a content play, hoping to channel Indonesian players into the Italian lower leagues for a TV series. When the club reached Serie B, the moment became too big to pass up. It was international or bust—if the world was going to Como, Como would have to go to the world.

The club started a robust e-commerce operation (12% of online sales heads to the U.S.) along with four team shops in the city center, increasing the number of team shops by, well, four. It blitzed hotels, recruited concierges and put billboards around town and on buses, resulting in fans from 122 different countries buying Serie B tickets last year. The club’s social media accounts boomed, writing posts in English and Italian.

And after the May 2024 promotion, the team reached VIP status. Adidas came aboard designing not just the kit but custom collections of non-soccer-related, Como-branded shoes and streetwear. Uber posted its name across the jersey as the main sponsor, in a town where you can’t even hail a casual Uber (only luxury-tier Uber Black). The club’s latest initiative is to sell match-ticket packages that include private boat tours and other luxury experiences.

But the biggest, most unexpected development? Celebrities made an afternoon at the Sinigaglia a part of their Como itinerary. In the last year alone, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Pine, Kate Beckinsale, Terry Crews, Jeff Goldblum, Hugh Grant and Andrew Garfield (who called it the most beautiful stadium in the world) have walked the biancoblu carpet, which led the club to overhaul its hospitality operation. A mix of luxury and international, Como the club became Como the city.

Celebrities like Goldblum (left), Thierry Henry (center) and Crews (right) flock to the Sinigaglia during their vacations on Lake Como. | Jacopo M. Raule/Getty Images for Como 1907

“Everyone involved wants the club to be known as much as the lake,” soccer legend and Como 1907 stakeholder Thierry Henry told Sky Sports. “... Because it’s a new era, things need to look cool.”

The need to look cool doesn’t just apply to the ambience. If Como 1907 adopted the traditional and world-renowned Italian playing style that focuses on lockdown defense, Sherlock Holmes, himself, would be nodding off over his risotto. The show on the pitch has to be just as important as the show off it, which happens to include in-stadium, pregame performances by top musical artists. That’s where Fabregas comes in, importing the famous Barcelona tiki-taka style and adapting it to a country that utterly despises it. The 37-year-old first-year manager remembers being booed in his first match in November 2023 because he had the team building an attack from the back. Six months later, he had the team in Serie A.

“It’s a fan base that has suffered a lot in the last 21 years,” Fabregas says. “I could see that they were a little bit insecure, that they didn't trust anybody that was coming around the project. … Slowly, slowly, the fans are starting to trust. They are starting to believe that something is happening.”

Backed by $100 million in new players and Fabregas’s vision, that success spilled over into Serie A and has fans looking ahead to something once so laughable that calling it a fable would’ve been too optimistic: European qualification.

“I met so many fans that they tell me that they've been following Como for decades and it's the first time that they feel that they are getting more, that they can go to the top,” Fabregas says.

Then, with a smile on his face like a new husband trying to impress his hard-to-win-over in-laws, he says, “Slowly, we are bonding.”

Como 1907 fans endured three bankruptcies and a 21-year wait before the club returned to Serie A. | Image Photo Agency/Getty Images

Yes, Como 1907 want the tourists and the celebrities, the VIPs and the MCs, but not in the way one might think. They see it as a way of sustaining their local fan base, of using their success to enrich the community. They don't seek the forbidden fruit of mass tourism solely for their own tastes. No, they are aiming for much more. They want the whole garden; they want to have their forbidden fruit and eat it too. It’s a risky business, and all it takes is a mistimed losing streak or a cultural misstep to alienate the base. But so far, for now, it’s working.

Fable and legend aside, along Lake Como there is one northern Italian tradition that will never fade: the sacred aperitivo. It is more than pre-lunch or post-work drinks. Aperitivo is the ritual of gathering, it is the most egalitarian Italian rite dictating that everyone has the right to a moment of leisure and solace. And here, it always comes with a view. Anyone who has ever had a sunset spritz along Lake Como knows that this vita doesn’t get any more dolce, as if the hands of the great creator carved the lake for the sole purpose of inspiring wonder and awe, art for art’s sake.

In terms of aperitivo havens, the views don’t get much better than the patio of the Bar Ristorante Tremezzino. Across the street, just 50 feet away, sailboats float by as the snow-capped Alps hover in the distance. The views are spectacular, but only if you can see through the bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic.

Inside, past the day trippers’ pizzas and spritzes, the locals gather for aperitivo and work-menu lunches, and from outside you can hear the roars of a fierce debate. If you don’t speak Italian, the yells sound as if a social club is turning into a fight club. The problem is that even if you do speak Italian, you still can’t understand a word, because the lingua franca of aperitivo is not Italian but the local dialect.

Italy is a nation younger than the United States, formed in 1861 after a unification of myriad republics and city-states that spoke their own languages, a cocktail of Italian mixed with the tongues of past ruling nations: German, French, Greek, Spanish and Arabic. In every town throughout Italy, those dialects still exist—but they only sometimes sound like Italian.

The dialect and the people of this part of Lake Como are called Laghée, and the elderly men yelling in dialect are having the most Laghée debate of all time: What is the best way to consume the chestnuts that fall in the forest, peeled and boiled (Italian: pelato; Laghée: pellé) or roasted over an open fire (Italian: caldarroste; Laghée: biröl). At the center of the chestnut debate is Davide Van De Sfroos, a musician who is both legend and fable in these parts, the de facto sage of Laghée dialect and the songwriter of Como 1907’s official club anthem: “Pulènta e Galèna Frègia” (Italian: Polenta e Gallina Fredda; English: Polenta and Cold Chicken).

As Italy globalized and European-ized, many dialects were left to the elderly for “fear of sounding like a hillbilly,” says Van De Sfroos, especially in a more industrialized northern Italy. But rather than play to the masses, Van De Sfroos, 60, built his career on narrowing his scope, writing songs exclusively in dialect from the stories he heard growing up around the lake.

“Soldiers, smugglers, mountaineers—everyone had a story to tell, everyone had a legend of the land they inhabited,” Van De Sfroos says. “They had a flair to how they narrated those stories, in dialect with cigarette-strained voices. … Without realizing it, I found myself feeling a call to this type of language because the stories I felt compelled to tell came in dialect. It was a language born of the mountains and the lake. It needed to be heard.”

Van De Sfroos—a name derived from a Laghée description of smugglers who once traversed the lakeside mountains delivering contraband to and from Switzerland—is as Laghée as they come. It’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit and yet he’s still wearing a flannel workman’s shirt and a sort of ascot to protect his neck from the wind, traditional Laghée. When he speaks in dialect, he is loud and passionate and throws elaborate hand gestures into the wind. He argues over where the accents should be placed in a language that is almost exclusively passed down orally. His music has made him a Laghée celebrity. His songs are screamed in pubs and at festivals, his lullabies rock the local children to sleep, and now they are chanted by fans before matches in the Sinigaglia as a sort of Laghée “Seven Nation Army.”

”My heart beats for Como [1907],” he says. “It makes me really emotional to see the fans singing that. … Musically, these songs are not the blues, but it’s our blues …  for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Just as the city of Como has prioritized luxury tourism over local recreation, the idyllic villages along the lake known for a slow-paced, rustic life (think Fiats, not Ferraris) have mutated into tourist hubs as more residents turn their properties into B&Bs. In Mezzegra (population: 1,032)—the hamlet where Van De Sfroos grew up, where Mussolini was executed and where hundreds of fascists and anti-fascists gather every year on his anniversary to fight over the on-site memorial—the collective spirit of the village, like the dialect itself, is fading into legend. On the subject of Mussolini’s death, Van De Sfroos says the town elders’ mantra was “the dead should remain dead.” It’s advice that now carries an ominous warning to dwindling towns.

Van De Sfroos sings almost exclusively in a Lake Como dialect passed down for generations. | Courtesy of Alessio Pizzicannella

“There used to be small businesses, fruit vendors, bakers and barbers. There was a dance hall and a library,” Van De Sfroos says. “It was a life based on ritual and simplicity with places to gather, but now the places don’t exist. The life of the piazza is no more.”

It’s why the Sinigaglia is so important, because it is one of the few places of gathering and belonging that have endured. It has also become a showcase of Laghée tradition, not just through song but in measures often sponsored by the club. The most prominent: embracing dialect. While Como 1907 seeks to extend their brand internationally, they have also embraced their parochial core for both pride and profit.

After hearing ”Pulènta e Galèna Frègia” belted out before every home game, the club contacted Van De Sfroos to rearrange the song using the crowd’s chant as background singers. Whereas most clubs front homogenous ultras groups with a unified political ideology, Como 1907 have encouraged the diversity of their 14 (and growing) fan clubs that represent different areas around the lake, each bringing with them different political leanings and banners in their own dialects.

From the beginning, Suwarso recognized the importance of nuance and embraced the various factions, making his email public so that he could make sure no one was left out of the club’s rebranding. He also rewards loyalty: Season ticket prices are the sixth-highest in Serie A—unless you’re a past season-ticket holder, where the price is the second-lowest in the league.

“We've been sensitive enough to understand what our parameters are, what is touchable and what's not touchable,” Suwarso says. “... We started to see that heritage and tradition is actually cool and contemporary, and marrying the two is based in serving the Como fans.”

Both the club and fans have embraced the local Como dialect, which at times can be unrecognizable for traditional Italian speakers. | Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images

Now, the local dialect is prominent in the official club brand. Banners with “Semm Cumasch” (Italian: Siamo Comaschi; English: We are Comaschi) can be seen across the stadium, on merch being sent as far as Japan and the U.S. and as near as the city’s bars and hospitals.

When babies are born in Como’s two hospitals, the club provides them with a “Semm Cumasch” onesie, fans from Day 1. And to photograph its “Semm Cumasch” shirts for a recent marketing campaign, the club found models among the Comaschi themselves in local bars. Cutrone says that during his daily walks in the city and along the lake with his family, people yell out to him in dialect. Kids run by him wearing his jersey.

“It’s incredible to see [Semm Cumasch] everywhere,” says Cutrone, who was born in Como’s Valduce Hospital. “It means we’re creating something positive not just in Como but abroad. … We are in love with our city, we live full lives here.”

But the biggest test of Como 1907’s rapport with their local fan base is just beginning. One of Italian soccer’s biggest afflictions is decrepit stadium infrastructure, and despite its surrounding beauty, the Sinigaglia is no different. As the second smallest stadium in Serie A, it seats just over 10,000 spectators  (it has already changed three times this season). While the views are breathtaking, the structure is outdated and rotten, which required the club to organize a miraculous series of quick renovations over the summer to get the stadium up to Serie A’s most basic standards (or risk playing home matches in Verona, two hours away.)

Completed in 1927, it is the sixth-oldest stadium in Serie A. It is also a historical landmark, an icon of the world-famous Rationalist movement popularized by Como and Milanese architects searching for the perfect balance of “functionality and necessity, built to resist time and last generations,” says Lo Castro. With structures based on geometric symmetry and using resistant natural materials like marble, reinforced concrete and soaring glass windows to maximize natural light, the style was so innovative that Mussolini adopted it as the literal building blocks for his aesthetic vision of a fascist society. The Sinigaglia is one such monument, and to fit this vision, it was much more than a soccer pitch. It was built along the lake to serve as a hub for rowing, track and swimming to encourage youth athletics.

“Now, Lake Como has become a brand and their selling point is the stadium that is right on the lake,” Lo Castro says. “But to protect its historical importance, it needs a restoration not a modification.”

With his finger on the pulse of the city, Suwarso knows the location of the stadium is key to both his vision of soccer tourism and the heart of the local fan base. He is learning the most important facet of Italian life, that nationalism scales up from localism. Here, you are first Laghée or Cumasch, then Italian—never the other way around.

“We do want to renovate but not lose what is authentically Italian,” Suwarso says. “If we were to try to make it modern, like what other clubs in Italy are trying to do to the foreign fans that we're trying to attract, it'll just be a secondary imitation of what so far it could be. … What makes us unique from the Premier League is the destination, which is Italy and Lake Como. If we stop talking about Italy, there's no differentiating between us and La Liga clubs or French clubs.”

This winter, the club submitted a proposal to the city outlining their vision for a renovated stadium. According to reports, the project—run by the same global architectural firm behind the new Wembley Stadium, Las Vegas’s The Sphere and the new Yankee Stadium—includes plans to upgrades capacity to 15,200, a hotel to take pressure off the residential B&B bubble, a gym, a food court featuring various restaurants, commercial space for local and international businesses, a medical center with the club’s equipment available for use by the public and a multi-story parking complex, which residents consider the biggest necessity. Suwarso says he wants a Sinigaglia that can be an asset to the city 365 days a year, not just on 19 Serie A gamedays. In essence, a revisiting of the stadium’s original, Rationalist purpose, where functionality meets necessity.

“Why not have it for the public to use, which can become a source of pride for the community,” Suwarso says. “The important part for us is that when we build something new, we [ask] how is it serving our purpose to grow commercially, how is it serving our purpose to serve the community and how are we serving Italy?”

With a completion date set for the start of the 2028 season, the club will face its biggest enemy yet: the infamous, slow-grinding Italian bureaucracy. Locals call it a fantasy; tongue in cheek, year after year for 17 years, the Comaschi ironically celebrated the anniversary of construction on the lakeside promenade only for it to flood again the month after “completion.”

But then again, this is a city and a club and a wonder of the world that breathes the oxygen of their legends. It wouldn’t be the first time myth became history, that a moment at the Sinigaglia left the Cumasch, as Van De Sfroos sings in dialect, buca vèrta che diis nagòt. Translation: speechless.