Como left the Stade Bollaert-Delelis having put nine goals past Lens, a tally no visiting side had ever managed in a single Champions League match. The result also matched Bayern Munich’s 9-0 win over Dinamo Zagreb in September 2024 as the most goals a team has scored in a single Champions League match.
It lifted Cesc Fabregas’s team to nine points from four league phase matchdays, with RB Leipzig and Manchester United already beaten along the way.
Fabregas, in his first Champions League season as a head coach, spent the post-match press conference in Lens waving every superlative away.
“We mustn’t start thinking we are phenomena. We have to say ‘lovely day, but let’s look ahead,’” he told Corriere dello Sport.
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He added to the Italian paper that the one goal his side had conceded had left him furious.
Como want him locked in beyond 2028
Fabregas is contracted to Como until the summer of 2028, a deal that has survived rounds of approaches from inside Italy and abroad. The Lombardy club, owned by the Indonesian Hartono family, have long made clear through the Italian press that they want to tie the Serie B-to-Champions League project to him for the long term.
Rejected suitors over the past year or so include Inter, Roma and Bayer Leverkusen, according to Gianluca Di Marzio. Fabregas has publicly stated his intention to continue the work in Como.
Three old clubs with a symbolic release
What complicates the picture is one line in the current contract. According to Di Marzio, Fabregas has a release clause tied to three of his old playing-career homes: Barcelona, Arsenal and Chelsea.
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The amount has not been made public, but the structure is clear: any of those three clubs can in effect lift him out of Como without a real market fee. Di Marzio has described the clause as conditional on which of them “starts to struggle” with their current coach.
Player, shareholder, coach
The Fabregas-Como story is unusual in European football because he is not just the head coach. He joined as a player in 2022 after leaving Monaco and took a minority stake in the ownership group that had bought the club out of Serie C. He retired at the end of 2022-23 and moved straight into coaching the Under-19 side.
He held the caretaker role in late 2023, and was given the job permanently in July 2024 after Como’s promotion to Serie A and once his UEFA Pro Licence came through. A tenth-placed Serie A finish followed, then a fourth-placed year that put Como into the Champions League for the first time.
Como have nine points from four league phase games, with four matchdays still to play in the competition’s new 36-team format.
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