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Few football careers transform as naturally into a managerial arc as Cesc Fabregas‘s has at Como. The story, widely reported across Italian football media and spotlighted recently by Football Tweet, reads like something a Hollywood writer would have binned for being too far-fetched. In the summer of 2023, Fabregas retired from professional football at Como, choosing the modest Lombard club as the final stop of a playing career that had carried him through Arsenal, Barcelona, Chelsea and Monaco. Instead of drifting into punditry or a comfortable ambassador role, he stayed at Sinigaglia and got straight to work.
From the Desk of a Former Gunner: Cesc Fabregas Is Building Something Special at Como, And Arsenal Should Watch Closely
After retiring, he immediately started working with Como’s Under-19s and B teams. However, he had yet to secure all of his UEFA qualifications when the club sacked Moreno Longo less than three months into the 2023–24 campaign. Fabregas stepped in as interim, recorded three wins, two draws and one defeat across six matches, and guided the side from seventh to third in the Serie B table. Como then appointed Osian Roberts as caretaker until the end of the season, with Fabregas named as the Welshman’s assistant, though he was quite clearly calling the shots throughout.
Como helped earn promotion to Serie A that season. On 19th July 2024, Fabregas signed a four-year contract as permanent head coach. His debut season in the top flight, Serie A’s most unforgiving arena, produced a tenth-place finish; the first time Como had managed to stay in Serie A in more than 30 years. Then came 2025–26, and the pace of progress shifted entirely.
On 19th October 2025, Fabregas coached Como to their first win over Juventus since 1952, defeating the 36-time champions 2–0 at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia. As of now in March 2026, Como sit in the top four, remain alive in the Coppa Italia semi-finals, and stand on the brink of qualifying for European football for the first time in the club’s history.
After the Juventus victory, Fabregas told DAZN Italia that Arsène Wenger is “like a second father” to him. The Spaniard added that he wants Como to emulate the attacking identity of those iconic late-1990s and early-2000s Arsenal sides. From him, those are not empty words.
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Como’s sporting director Carlalberto Ludi has said that Fabregas is “even better as a coach” than he was as a player. That is quite the claim for a man who, by the age of 23, had already won a European Championship and a World Cup with Spain. At 38, the Spaniard is still years away from the age at which most elite managers hit their peak. However, he already operates with the kind of tactical sharpness and calm authority you would associate with someone a decade deeper into management.
Fabregas deploys a 4-2-3-1 structure and encourages his side to build with possession, pressing aggressively from the front and using wide traps to win the ball high up the pitch. The style is clearly Wengerian at its core, but it carries Fabregas’s own stamp throughout. For Arsenal supporters watching Mikel Arteta’s project mature at the Emirates in early 2026, the parallel is striking. Two former Gunner midfielders, each moulding a club in Wenger’s philosophical image, even if the budgets and ambitions are worlds apart.
That question is worth sitting with. Arsenal‘s managerial future beyond Arteta is something nobody at the club are discussing publicly, but it is a question that exists. Arteta has genuinely built something at the Emirates that feels durable, but the day will come. When it does, Fabregas, someone whose connection to Arsenal goes back to his teenage years at Hale End, will be one of the most compelling and emotionally loaded candidates you could name, if he keeps going the way he is. Once a Gunner, it seems, always a Gunner.