Cesc Fàbregas has moved from project to possibility. After helping Como climb from Serie B to the Champions League in less than three years, the former Spain midfielder is now being talked about as a possible Manchester United target if the club decides to dispense with Michael Carrick.
The speed of that rise is what has made the noise stick. Fàbregas joined Como in 2022 as both a player and a shareholder, then helped steer the football side of a club that now sits in a very different place from the one he entered. Manchester United tried to sign him when he was at Barcelona, and the old interest has resurfaced at a time when his name carries far more weight on the touchline than it did when he arrived in Italy.
Carlalberto Ludi, Como's director, has gone even further, saying Fàbregas is an even better coach than he was a player. That is a serious claim about someone who made his professional debut at Arsenal when he was 16 and spent years as one of the defining midfielders of his generation. But in football, reputation changes quickly when the results change with it, and Como's numbers now give that reputation real force.
Fàbregas said he was practically given the keys to the football side of things after Como sealed qualification for the Champions League with a 4-1 win at Cremonese on the final day of the 2025-26 Serie A season. He also described the scale of the transformation in blunt terms. There was practically nothing when Como started, he said. Four years ago the club did not even have a training ground, and massages had to be done on tables in the back room of a bar. Now, as he put it, they are in the Champions League.
That climb, though, did not happen in a vacuum. The Djarum Group bought Como in 2019, Dennis Wise had already done excellent work there, and the club's rise has also been tied to major financial backing and groundwork laid before Fàbregas became the public face of the project. Mirwan Suwarso said he stumbled across Como by chance while exploring potential venues in Milan for a sort of football documentary set in Italy, which makes the whole story sound accidental. Fàbregas, by contrast, turned it into something far more deliberate.
His own path to Como began after the hardest season of his career. The 2021-22 Ligue 1 campaign at Monaco brought just 36 minutes of game time, a finish that left him looking for a fresh start and a new project. He had already visited the city a couple of times to see its world-famous lake, and what began as an unlikely move has become one of the most striking rises in European football. That is why his name is now attached to Manchester United talk, and why the next decision matters: whether United move on from Carrick, and whether they decide that the man who turned Como into a Champions League club is the one they want next.
