Cesc Fabregas has never been one for illusion. Not as a player, and certainly not now as the coach of Italy’s most intriguing climber.
Como have raced from Serie B to the Champions League in three breathless years, a surge so quick it has left the rest of Serie A trying to work out whether this is a fairy tale, a revolution, or a bubble waiting to burst. Yet as the spotlight grows harsher, Fabregas keeps pointing it somewhere else.
Not at himself. Not at the Scudetto race. Squarely at Frosinone.
On Sunday afternoon at the Stadio Benito Stirpe, Como walk into what their coach calls “one of the five most difficult matches” of their league season. The timing is telling. Roma and Inter collide the day before in a heavyweight Scudetto showdown, but Fabregas refuses to let anyone drag his team into that conversation.
“In my view, they are the two strongest teams in Italy,” he said in his press conference. “I will watch it because I love football and think it is going to be an incredible game, not because they are our direct competitors for position.”
No talk of a title race. No flirting with the idea. Just a hard reset.
No Cruyff comparisons, only Mourinho’s cold line
The rise of Como, the attractive football, the clarity of the project – all of it has inevitably drawn big comparisons. Some have even suggested Fabregas is building something reminiscent of Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona.
He knocked that down immediately.
“I am a long way from so many, let alone him,” he said, before reaching for a line from Jose Mourinho that cuts through the romance. “Jose Mourinho said there are coaches who have won titles and others who won zero titles, and I am in the latter camp.”
That sentence hangs in the air. A World Cup winner, a serial champion as a player, now defining himself by what he has not yet done on the touchline.
It is deliberate. It shifts the narrative away from the cult of the coach and back onto the badge.
“The most important thing is Como, not me,” he stressed. “I am within this project and I give it my all. The key for a coach is time to work, and I think this team has improved so much over the last two years. If we can continue with this same side for two, four, five years, then we can really do something, but if we change every six months, it’s difficult.”
That is the spine of the project: continuity, not chaos. Evolution, not revolution every window.
Frosinone: friends, courage and a genuine threat
All of that long-term thinking pauses, though, when the subject turns to Frosinone.
Promoted from Serie B in the summer, Massimiliano Alvini’s side have taken two wins and a draw from their last three games and play with a fearless edge that has caught Fabregas’ eye.
“It is going to be one of the five most difficult matches of our Serie A season,” he insisted. No attempt to soften it, no attempt to flatter his own team.
“Frosinone are in great form, watching them I can see 11 friends giving their all for each other, they play with courage and on the front foot. We need the perfect performance and I really enjoyed seeing Massimiliano Alvini’s team in action.
“They have a fluidity and a very positive mentality, they’re a genuine danger for anyone they face, and if we want to win, we need our best performance of the season.”
The message to his players is clear: forget the table, forget the Champions League, forget Roma and Inter. This is not a trap game. This is a test of who Como really are.
Full squad, big call in goal
For the first time this season, Fabregas will have a full squad at his disposal. Even that piece of good news comes with a sharp edge.
Jayden Addai, out after surgery for a torn Achilles tendon, is finally ready to return to the bench. His presence adds depth and a different attacking option, but the real dilemma sits 90 yards from goal.
Como must choose between their long-term No.1 Jean Butez and new arrival Robert Sanchez, on loan from Chelsea.
“Sanchez arrived from a very important club, he won trophies and knows how to deal with constant pressure to win,” Fabregas said. “We didn’t expect him to come here, but it’s important for every player to get rest, even the goalkeepers. The last game was the first time in a year and a half that Butez didn’t start.
“That was a test, we’ll take it one game at a time and see what happens.”
It is a classic big-club problem in a club that, until recently, had no business thinking like one: two serious goalkeepers, one shirt. Rest, rotation, or a changing of the guard? Fabregas is not saying. Not yet.
What he is saying, over and over, is that Como’s story will not be written in headlines about Scudetto battles they are not part of, or in grand comparisons to Cruyff that he does not want.
It will be written in places like Frosinone, on afternoons where a team with soaring ambitions has to prove it can still grind, suffer and produce, as their coach demands, “the perfect performance.”
