EP. 06 | Mirwan Suwarso

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Portugal Football Summit podcast. Few stories in European football in recent years have been as compelling as the rise of Como 1907. A club that was playing in Cedida just seven years ago, a club that was essentially rebuilt from the ground up after near extinction. And the club that finished this Cedida season in fourth place, qualifying for the UEFA Champions League for the first time ever. But what makes Como's story truly distinctive is not just the results, it's how they got there. This is a club led by ownership from Indonesia's Jaron Group, coached by Cezc Fabregas, and run with a philosophy that blends football with brand, landscape, and a long-term business thinking as well. They called it a boutique project, and it has captured the imagination of the football world, especially after Como qualified for the UEFA Champions League for the first time. The man at the center of that project is Miruan Suarzo, Como's president, who has overseen the club's journey from acquisition to Cedida establishment. He's here with us today. Miran, it's fantastic to have an opportunity to catch up with you. And I know it's been a few weeks now, but congratulations are still in order for what was an historic season, qualification for the UEFA Champions League. I can imagine the impact that it had at the club, at fan level, at region level, but tell me what exactly this meant to you, and how much of it was elation at the achievement, and then maybe a sense of warrior, of everything that you need to start doing to prepare for next season in a completely different way. Thank you so much, Miran. Obviously it's all of the above. The sportings result was fantastic, right? Everybody was excited, the city is excited. But at the same time, we were very quick to realize, can we live up to the expectation? Because the infrastructure of the club is still being built. We are still trying to get there commercially, as well as the support system that we are trying to put in place is maybe two years behind, or three years behind, from where we needed to be. So now we're trying to accelerate everything. And at the same time, we are now entering already into European competition environment, in which there are more restrictions that we have to try to fulfill, we try to meet, and that requires extra effort. So I think none of us actually took a break, and we immediately started to start working. We'll get into some of those challenges in a minute, but I wanted to ask you, when during this season, you thought that it would be possible to get European qualification, not necessarily Champions League, because I would be fair to say that that was a dream, perhaps, scenario, but when did you internally feel, okay, this season is going above our expectations, we could qualify for Europe? I think early on in the season, we were getting some favorable results. I think we got to like fifth place before the first international break, or maybe second international break, I can't really remember. So then I think that's where the impetus of the dream, starting to come in into our thoughts. However, we started to become sure after the January break. We realized we're in a good position. We were able to compete against some of the more historical teams. And we're starting to see that a lot of the other teams in Italy saw us differently. They competed as if we are among the bigger teams that historically they really, really put their performance to the maximum again. So that's when we said we might have a chance here if we can just maintain the focus and push on. And I believe SESC as our coach, really, really believe that we could do it. It was amazing to see the sequence of results and as someone who's followed football for a few decades now, you see these Cinderella stories happen. And then sooner or later, because football is a tough business, reality sets in. So like you said, you were fifth close to the beginning of the season. You continue to have solid results. But then a lot of people, and maybe even in Italy, think, OK, Cuomo is fifth now. They're top eight now. But sooner or later, they'll fall back to reality and they'll get into mid-table, best-case scenario. What was the reaction that you felt as you kept on winning and perhaps some of those historical clubs that maybe at the beginning of the season looked at you and said, oh, wow, that's quite a cool project. It's good to have a team like Cuomo back, a region like Cuomo back, suddenly say, oh no, it's not so good to have Cuomo back because they're beating our rivals and they're competing for our European spots. I think that sentiment will still be there if not stronger. We realized that we are probably growing a little too fast. And it was really good to have a leader on the field like Cess who has been there before, who has been in this kind of like pressure environment before. And being able to instill a sense of belief to this squad and also to us who are behind him, I think it's paramount to how we got here today. It's a sense of belief that allow us to overperform in a sense. When it comes to the way at which the club from an institutional standpoint and a corporate standpoint looks at a step like qualification for the Champions League, the additional requirements, the additional standards. What are some of those biggest challenges as a club that you must overtake in order to be prepared? So is there a countdown right now? Do you have a variety of projects that are moving at fast pace in order for you to be ready? Can you take us into what your day to day as far as the club is looking like right now, leading up to the new season? The one thing that we have grown significantly is in our retail site or retail environment. And what we've learned in Cuomo is that how we can actually take. We're not Liverpool. We're not Real Madrid who brands like Adidas come in and give you 40 million a year, or Juventus for that matter. We are Cuomo. When they come to us, most likely, they give us free uniform as a value in kind, maybe a token of a millionaire too, as a retainer, but it comes with a requirement of how much of their products we have to purchase. So we looked at it and we saw that actually, we were able to take this opportunity or this experience to then create our own merchandise line, which have grown maybe three times year over year, to the point that our football merchandising is now only 48% or 43% actually, 48 after discount, of our total merchandising revenue. We have started to create a wider range. And from that lessons, we've met a lot of other football teams and says, maybe we can actually serve other clubs to do the same. And this is what our priority is within this minute to season finish, till today, how can we pass on our learnings to service other clubs, increase their non-football revenue as well? Now, our logic is if we can accelerate this growth and we can do this to 10, 14, 15, 20 clubs, we will then mitigate our performance on the field risk to something that can be more sustainable. So that's priority one. How can we grow our retail business as quickly as possible, which is of course in line as we grow and prepare for the season for the Champions League season? Secondly, how can we actually grow additional non-football revenues that's linked to the area? Because now we have a lot of the attention that comes with the promotion to the Champions League. We're trying to grow all the hospitality business, meaning, for us, we're fortunate enough, we're in Lake Como. We have businesses that sit on the lake that doesn't rely on the football business, but having a lot of attention does help a lot. And obviously, beyond that is how can we increase-- it's very fortuitous that a lot of the sponsorship deals that we had from when we were in Second Division expired at the end of last season. So as we're renewing and also negotiating with new sponsors for the Champions League season, it comes at the best times. And we just have to make sure that we can do this, create a long-term plan and help us grow. So in short, what we've tried to do is like we try to look beyond the traditional football club revenue model and try to create what we call a multi-club servicing model. Today, I think we have now secured agreements with 14 clubs to start to operate the retail environment for them. And hopefully, we can take the experience from this Champions League season to service more clubs. That's a really interesting model and taking the opportunity of our conversation here and our podcast. I think it's a good opportunity to promote it as well, especially in a B2B environment. What has been the reaction of clubs when you approach them and what kind of case studies or success stories do you share with them? from a media standpoint, it's been clear that KOMO has positioned itself as a boutique luxury brand, not just the club, but the brand of the club itself. You mentioned the proximity to Lake KOMO, obviously, there helps, but the way you've made the most of that has been really impressive from day one of reaching, let's say, CERI-B and then CERI-A as well. And you have a variety of campaigns, activations, collaborations that you've been able to deliver with strong entertainment brands, with celebrities, with other brands that take you outside of the traditional football landscape, so to speak. So when you approach clubs and when you have discussions with other clubs, what kind of stories do you tell them concretely about the success you've had outside of just what we may see in the media or in the digital space? We are by nature very curious, right? So when we talk to clubs, it's never us trying to sell them something, it's to learn how they operate, to learn what they. how well they do certain things. And during these conversations, usually, we exchange ideas, because sometimes they say, "Oh, we like what you've done," and we just exchange ideas. And in doing so, we offer, most of the time, then, "Well, why don't we do this for you?" We sometimes we offer this opportunity. And we're in a position where we have learned enough and have created some sort of economies of scale that we can create products and merchandise ready for much larger quantities. So we come to the clubs, not asking for money, but actually giving them solutions. Like we do the design, we do the production, we do the marketing, and they don't have to spend any money. And then we don't ask for. We don't just give them royalty. We just do full revenue share. So it's almost like a no-risk proposition for these brands, for these clubs, to try this work relationship on. So maybe that's why we have managed to be able to get as many clubs as we have now. And we do it both from initially using the partnership with our partner brand, Rudd, the premium urban street work brand that we work with. So that's the first one. We do the root capsule collection, which is very premium products. And then from there, we start doing into the lifestyles. And to the extent that we're now talking to some clubs, we will operate their e-commerce platform. We will operate even their physical stores for them. And the way we try to think of it is that, no, we don't want to come in and just take your business. What we want to do is we want to grow together. And it's important for us that they grow as quickly and as big as possible because the way we see it, the better we can help other clubs, I'm pretty sure at some point they can help us too. In a business where player transfers still dominate the commercial landscape, being able to have this kind of relationship help all of us. For example, if we can help somebody increase their commercial revenue by 5 to 10 million, they will be able to buy players elsewhere for 5 to 10 million. And the economy just keeps circulating and that helps everybody. That's a really interesting model. If you look back at some of the activations you've had over the past couple of seasons or so, which have been some of your favorite ones at KOMO? Has it been bringing celebrities over and giving them a different football experience? Has it been particular collaborations? Has it been activations that you did with players? Is there maybe one or two examples you can share with us? I think the most exciting one for us when we first started to create our own Adidas line. So we purchased a lot of products from Adidas in which we then allowed create the customization on it. The first semkumask line, because you know, there was the first time we actually touched into our roots. I think it was sold out within a couple of weeks. And then when we moved on to doing the shoes and I saw people lining up in the stores to buy the KOMO shoes, there was amazing. I never thought they could have happened so quickly to then give us confidence to start creating more and more products of our own. To eventually start developing our own brand, our own mono brand. I think it was the retro collection, which we all very, very proud here, because the sales was exceeding that of the football spirit, the jerseys. So that's to us, was a testament to the strength of the creativity behind our teams to start coming up with products that is not dependent on the football team itself. I love one of the campaigns that I saw recently on social media where you had a call to action to fans around the world, football fans around the world, to design a shirt for KOMO. I absolutely love it, because you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. Right? Absolutely. And take me through the process, yeah, take me through the process of approving that idea and how the reaction has been so far. How many proposals have you received? Well, it's quite interesting, because we always thought like, as we grow, we need more and more designers, but we don't want the traditional kind of people. We want new thinkers, you know, just like as our recruitment department has managed to find scouts from Twitter, kids who are just enthusiastic, but apparently are talented. We do the same in our creative department. And we hire people based on many, many things. Usually they style themselves when they dress dressing. Sometimes we look at them and say, "That's really cool, would you show us how you would style this design? How would you style this design?" And then I said, "Would you like to become our stylist?" And that's happened locally in KOMO. For this particular t-shirt contest, it's actually there are several layers in the challenge. We say, like, you know, design a t-shirt, a lot of people design a jersey. Then that's for present foremost, we already know the guy's not reading. Doesn't understand the brief. And then we say, like, you know, just the simple stuff, if you can make it cool about KOMO, then for us it's like, you know, "Okay, we see how they think." And it's important for us to, when we look at the design, it's not just how it looks, how do you call it visually, but how is the thinking behind it? A lot of people know who they are, they just come up with something and put it on AI, but you can tell that there's not much strategic thinking behind it. And we haven't found the one that we really fall in love with. And there's a lot of people that's been tagging us here and there. A lot of people send it direct messages to our employees. And again, that disqualifies them because the campaign clearly says you just have to tag KOMO football, you know, that shows that you can't read and follow instructions. So for us, it's a lot of the designs, some are quite interesting, but we haven't found the one that we say is that's different, that's for us, not yet, but I'm sure we will. Following your story, and we've talked a couple of times already at the Portugal Football Summit in Oedish last season, and then in another event in Budapest before the Champions League final. So I know your story, I followed your story. I know how many disruptive decisions have been taken, and you know, how much you've kind of gone all in on innovation. It's fascinating to be, because in several regions, several countries, decisions are still at clubs are made many times for political reasons. They're made in a very conservative way. There's still an aversion to taking risks many times because of the way that fans may react to a campaign, to a product. That really doesn't bother you at all, does it? You really, as long as the core group of decision-makers at the club believe there is a particular path or particular proposal that you should go for, you really go for it. You give that impression. That's one question. The other question is perhaps what was the most disruptive decision, or risky decision that you think you've taken since acquiring the club back in 2019? For us, we innovate because we're desperate, because we have to have accelerated growth. It's not a question of whether the idea of what school or not, but we have to try as many ideas as possible, because if we follow the regular blueprint, we know we will never catch up of where we need to be. We're a small club with big ambition. If we just rely on tickets, ticket sales, commercial advertising, commercial revenue, and broadcast rights. MediaRuch. It's impossible. We're too small. We really need to learn. We just look at it. This is the target that we need to generate. This is how much we can do now. This is the big gap. How do we address this big gap? We just come up ideas. One, ideas. Two, ideas. 10, that is 50. We just run it. The way we see it is, is it a good idea or a bad idea? There's such a thing as a bad idea. The question that disqualify an idea is can we execute it and can we afford to do the idea? If we can afford it and we don't think it's too crazy, we just say like let's try it. It's not going to cost us nothing, but failure. And we failed many, many, many, many, many times. There's so many ideas that's been discarded. So if you ask me like, what's the most risky idea? I can't tell anymore because we've done so many ideas that we forget about them. We fail and we move on. We have very short memory. When we say something didn't work out, we just kind of like forget about it. Let's move on. Let's come up with 10 more ideas. And I think that's become very healthy for us to not be afraid to just keep trying new things. Also that the staff, the team and the staff in my team, we're all very young, except me. I think I'm the oldest one. So having this kind of like, don't worry about it. Keep moving on. Don't worry about it. Let's move on. Let's move on. Allow them to not be afraid. And when they're not afraid, they're there to try more crazy ideas. And I love them. When they come up with all these school ideas, that's when I get excited. I mean, one of the craziest ideas that I love was that we looked at into our offices in the stadium. This was staff office, the sports director's office. This was plastic walls, white plaster walls. And I said to them, we have all these assets here, space. And there's no money here. Can't we just get rid of everybody? Change it somehow into a hospitality area. Make it look really cool that people want to spend a lot of money on it. And we had the challenge. We said, like, let's make it look so rustic. Let's decorate it with old palatial wallpaper to look at, to make it look like old Italian palaces. But not spend more than $25,000 per room. So that means going to the flea market, looking for furniture. And we were surprised. We were amazingly surprised because what happened was, okay, you did the wallpaper, you did everything. Maybe you spend $7,000, $8,000 per room. And then when we went to the flea markets, we had a girl. She's Italian American, but she's really into arts. She went to the flea markets and she discovered pieces from the 1700s, from the 1800s, being sold for only like a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars. And we were able to fill a room for maybe not spending more than 25,000, as I said earlier. And then sell them for almost 400,000 per room. To guest who then come in there and they go, wow, this is so authentically Italian. Because it's true. And we were lucky as well when we were, when the club was bankrupt, a lot of the fans took away all the club souvenirs memorabilia. After COVID, after working with them, maybe two, three years with them, a lot of them came back. So I took this away from the club when they went bankrupt. I think now you're the right caretaker for it. Suboneers from the 30s, from the 50s authentic ones about the club. Then we then put back into every room. So every room tells a story. And as now it's become something that we are very proud of because it was previously just office space. There was not generating any money to become an area in which some fans are very extremely proud of. I wanted to ask you about all the work that you need to undertake at the Sini Galia Stadium in order to make it more modern. Make it live up to the standards of the UEFA Champions League, for example. What kind of work are you undergoing now? And what are your expectations for the stadium for next season? Well, we see the stadium development in two phases. First and foremost to actually meet the UEFA requirement for the Champions League. And secondly, for the long term, how can we make it become a center for the community? So we have the long term goal. But at the same time, we have the urgency to actually start being able to play there. So one of the requirement was that no temporary stand. So we've already knocked down one area of the stadium to rebuild the stand, become a permanent stand. And the rest of the requirement for UEFA is not as complicated as building a permanent stand. So I think we'll get there before the beginning of the season. We have to be creative a lot. For example, I remember in the stadium, the stadium only had enough space for 100 people in the hospitality area. And by saying hospitality, meaning a room where you can put food and drinks in there, it's very basic. We wanted to give more because otherwise we cannot raise the prices. So what we did, we looked around, says like, hey, the stadium may be small, the area of the stadium. But there are four villas behind the stadium that's on the lake. What if we rent those villas? Because we have seats. We don't have space. What if we rent those villas and we use them as our pre-game hospitality and post-game hospitality. And in doing so, we increase our hospitality from 150 to I think almost 800. And increasing the price from 60 euros to now we can go up to 2500. Because of the experience that we give, one of the hospitality areas actually a boat that accommodates 100 people. That before the game. So we're going to do all this again for champions, Nick and amplify them to a bigger level. And at the same time, we're planning for the building for the long term of our stadium. And we were very mindful because the stadiums in the heart of the city, we want to work with the community as closely as possible to make it work. Not just for us for a football team, but for them as the heart of the community. And Komo is becoming very, very expensive for a lot of the local businesses. So we decided to create a big hub in the middle where we use initially we thought about building a hotel and we realized there's no point. There's too many hotels there already. So why not create that as a low rent area for local businesses to open like space for their kind of like a food court, but only for local businesses and you must be from Komo. And you must be a native of Komo in order to be able to to rent space and operate there and this going to be very low rent. So they become hub of this of the local people to create a activity there. We wanted to create a health facilities that's to serve the community as well. So bring the best of the clubs medical staff to actually service the public. And then on top of it, obviously on the lake facing side, that's where we tried to monetize the most by creating restaurants and rooftop bars on all the kind of all the cool things that we can create over there and immediately generate funds for the club over 365 days a year because it is right on the lake and it is a place where tourist frequent a lot. So the way we see it as we develop, we must take into consideration what we need. Secondly, what the community needs in terms of facilities time point third, what is the general population needs in terms of entertainment and commercial commercial activities. So when we combine all these three together, I think we can we can definitely meet all the requirements and what the public needs as well. It's incredibly important to continue to engage the local community as international as you want the brand to be and as much as you want to appeal to a mass audience because you need scale, you need you need it for a variety of reasons and and obviously to to beat to beat records on on sales. That's definitely part of the part of the strategy you need to make sure that come always relevant around the world. But if you forget about the local community sooner or later, that's going to to come back and bite you right so it's good that you have those pillars and you keep the balance between all of them to ensure that the club continues to be true and be resonating with with the original fans and the local fans that are going to support you kind of weekend week out. At your matches at home so that that that was interesting that you mentioned that and continuing the kind of innovation and disruption vibe but moving it towards the pitch. It may be easy to say in hindsight that it was an obvious decision to hire someone like CESC as manager but back then when you did it that's that's not true because this was a manager who basically did not have a lot of well you had no top tier experience. But did not have a lot of a first team experience as as a head coach. What did you see there more than obviously the profile of him being one of the best players of his generation but what did you see there from a character standpoint and a leadership standpoint that that convinced the group and the club to hire him. CESC when he finished playing he wanted to learn how to coach he wanted to coach and he was given the chance to coach the youth team or primavera and what we saw was that we didn't take it you know like we were still focusing on the first team at the time but CESC and I had a lot of conversations about football and you can tell this is a man who doesn't just talk about it but he thought a lot about it. So I asked him like you know if you are developing all this what how would you do it what is the vision. Who are we as a team in terms of playing style in terms of development and he came to me with a 40 page document about how we should play how we should actually be really yeah because we were talking about like you know our goals have to grow common because I was I was at the time the team was playing very low block very counter attacking it wasn't exciting at all. I didn't even I didn't want to watch most of the games. It was just too tense, you know? You watch it, you score an early goal and then you spend 70 minutes watching the other team attacking you. I'm like, "This is not sport, this is sport for my heart. I didn't want to see that. I just watch it on life score. That was easier." But then when I talk to Sask and we're saying, you know, the way we defend it should be like by pressing first all this kind of like show it to me, explain it to me. And he showed me this documents of how a team should play in Italy. And then he says like how to develop the players to play in this system like this, a philosophy. And I said to him like, "Well, this is in line with how I think the Komo brand should be because we want to become a tourism destination." So meaning the football has to be attractive as well. Being a lose, you never know, but being attractive, being dominant, being aggressive, you can control the winner, lose the results. You leave it up to the gods of football, so to speak. So when I saw that, and then I'm like, "I'm also mindful. I'm not a soccer person. I'm in a football guy." So I had to have second opinion from other people who has been in the industry a lot longer than I have. So that's when I started to have come up with the idea of creating a football council with other sports directors that I could bring in as consultants. So then we created that. And then we all watched at different times the games that SES coach. And we can see there was clear ideas. It was a philosophy that was being, you know, and SES was not blessed with the best of talents at the time. He didn't have any defenders. He was somehow the defenders that moved on. We didn't have enough money to recruit new ones. And the priority was never on the primavera. I was always in the first team trying to change promotion. Somehow he converted all these midfielders he had to become fullbacks. And yet the team played so well. And I think remember we all watched a friendly game between KOMO against Inter Youth Team, in which we won 3-1, not by corner kick set pieces and counter attacks. And it was basically by a style of play that he has consistently played across the primavera season. So that's when we said, you know what? Let's do it. He should actually take over, give him a chance. Then we started trying to figure out when's the best time for him to come in, to give him time to prepare the team, so to speak. And the best time was during the winter, not winter, so the international break. He would have two weeks to prepare the team. So then we had to have the courage to terminate the coach regardless of whatever the result happened. And at that time the coach just won the game. For the first time in the season, the team was in the playoff position. And we had to decide, do it now or do it later. Of course everybody is then saying like, you're crazy, you can't. You're in the playoff position. You cannot get rid of a coach. But we were convinced. We saw that looking at the statistics and data, the team was overperforming. It was a matter of fact before there'd be a correction. So better to do it, pull the trigger now anyway. And we did. We did it in October. And I was lucky that the assess didn't disappoint. I think you make your own luck, right? And luck also takes a lot of work. So you did the preparation work. And then you got lucky in light of the work and the preparation that had been done. When you talk about talent, obviously nowadays it's so difficult to compete for talent. The scouting networks are incredible around the world. How do you compete in order to bring talented young players? And how much is the future strategy to do that also to try to invest in Italian talent? I know if you look at the current state of Italian international football, let's say it's a tough time considering that the national team has now failed to qualify for three straight world cups. That's a long time. So it reflects some challenges there as far as talent is concerned in the Italian landscape. But you do have to have Italian representation in your squad. You do have to increase that as well. I'm guessing into the next season. So two part question here. How do you compete for talent? And how do you make sure that you can also have a bigger Italian presence in your squad? It's yeah, so it's a tricky question that because the reason why we cannot have many talents in the team so far is when you increase the level as we came in, when we first got promoted to Serie A, our goal was to stay in Serie A just to survive. In the position 16 to 14 would have been a great. So in that first season, I do believe we bought maybe about four or five Italians, Italian players. Why? Because they were still affordable then. When you aiming for that level, you probably spend three, four, at most five million per player, maybe six. Okay. Right? So you can still have that outlay. And then we started moving into a Christmas window. We started to see that we can actually push beyond merely surviving, but starting to try to challenge. And we started buying players, which I would have to say have resale value. So we started buying like a San D'Al for 12 million. Maxon's Cacarere for 15 million. These are players which we believe would be the future of the club and the value is much higher. And we're able to do it because if you buy outside of Italy, you don't have to pay everything with a banker and you're in full. You can pay over three, four, five years in terms of payment terms and structure your cash flow. Now Italy, you're not allowed to do that. The rules requires you to actually pay in full or provide a banker and tea, which makes it very restrictive to do a massive overall by buying players from Italy. Not just Italian, but just from any clubs in Italy. That's the requirement. And then we got to the second year of Serie A. Our ambition was higher. We don't want to be number 10 anymore. We want to be number 8 or number 6. To buy players from an Italian club that plays in top 8 to top 6 to top 5, you're now looking at 25, 15 to 25 million Euro players. They become even more unaffordable to us. So that's why we bought the Hazus Rodriguez from Rio de Janeiro, who we bought for 20 million or 18 million. But we were able to stretch that payment over five years. Martin Baturina from Dinamozagra for 18 million. But again, we stretched the payment for multiple years as well. Now we were able to assemble a team that we thought could compete to hopefully get to 8, 7, 6 place by that time. But surprisingly, we finished fourth. Now we have to restrainsen again for the Champions League. This is where the decision comes. How do we do it? Because we also have UFR financial fair play to look forward to. We cannot. Yeah, we cannot just buy players as we did before. We have to balance the budget. So this is as we do this, we, even from last year, we started to realize to strategize that our investment in the local talent has to be at the academy. So when we started three years ago, we did not have any players in the Italian international environment, right? The academy system. Today, I would say we are just shortly behind Juventus and Roma with Italian youth internationals within the Como setup. Not all of them acquired. I think three or four were actually groomed and grown up raised in the club. So something is working and we're starting to push more and more and hopefully we can start getting them into the first team. Sesc has already brought in four, four under 19 players into the first team squad. Last season, he played two of them in the Coppa Italia and towards the end of the season, he actually had a 17 year old in the first team as well, ready to come in should the opportunity allows it to do so. So he's very mindful of building that generation for the future. Now as we get into the Champions League, our priority now is to actually start trading our players. We have to move players up. We have 24 players that last year was on loan at other clubs. We need to move them, we need to start to monetize them to improve our financial fair play ratio. At the same time, we need to start attracting Italian towns to come into the academy, they can hopefully move up. So I'm hoping by 2028, we will see some academy products sitting with our first team squad, maybe already contributing in some minutes and hopefully beyond that, we will be more heavily focused into our own academy because that's where the concentration is. Having said that one thing I must not neglect to say is that we knew that developing a culture was important and that's why we created this football council thing. One of the first hires was a technical, a former technical director of Wales. who created the structure within the Wales FA to create a Welsh team that can compete towards international competition, Ocean Roberts, who is also a UFA coach instructor. After Wales, he became the technical director of Morocco and was arguably instrumental in making Morocco the power of today by developing coaches, proper scouting and whatnot. This is what has been his priority at Como, not only developing players, but most importantly for us developing coaches that can help us produce players within the academy. We work together within this council, I mean overuse the word, but with so many different people from so many different backgrounds, we can then create a culture that is not dependent on one man's thinking. I'm not saying it's about, says, it's fundamental to all this, but everybody contributes to create a culture that we can then hopefully say it's our own. So that's the long term plan. Yeah, and obviously you expand your expertise across professionals who have a variety of different experiences and can bring different perspectives as well. You have the funnel, I guess, and then you filter it down to to to to to desk making, you know, the final decision, I guess, as far as the sport and and his style and identity are concerned. So that makes that makes sense. Miran, we're about to wrap up our chat here, I really, really enjoyed it. I wanted to ask you one question about your participation in the Portugal Football Summit last year, and get your insight on why you like participating in these events and what you think these kind of events can can do to have knowledge sharing and to make the football industry ever more, you know, professional credible and innovative. I think for me personally coming from outside the football industry, it was it was nice to come into such an event and meet other people and other practitioners and exchanging, saying exchanging ideas over use, but sometimes you actually need to come there with a mindset of like, I've got a problem. Can you help me and try to meet people says like, you know, immediately you say like, instead of you coming in, so like, Hey, I got this immediately as usually when I meet people like I still I can't forget Stacey whom from LA LA LAFC at the time who I met at your panel. Yeah, the first thing I said to her is like, Hey, I really love what you've done. I've got a problem that just like this, how would you tackle it? And she was very generous to actually give her opinion right away. And then from there immediately we come up with some ideas to actually help each other and and that's how the first collaboration in Como with another club happened through that conversation at the Portugal Football Summit. Cool. So I'm always keen because through this kind of like meetings, this way you find other opportunities and it's the same one actually it I think it's the same one I met the people from Mallorca who then also build the same relationship. So it's without going to these kind of functions, I think all football clubs are too busy with their seasons and having the taking this like two, three days out to meet other clubs is this valuable extremely valuable. Very cool. Okay, so before the final whistle goes, I've got a quick fire round here for you three questions and you can just give me like one, two, three word answers favorite match since you took over. Juventus when we won at home for the first time. One player who surprised you this year. Even small chitch from we bought him from a HNK Rijeka has become a solid solid player for us. Very cool and in one sentence what does come on into you passion community and heart the place that got a lot of heart. Yeah, the hearts, the hearts got to be strong to take the pressure to take the roller coaster for sure. I got to give it to the people in Komo, you know, because through through the ups and down they have never given us a hard time. Instead when things go down as I can't forget it we lost five one against Modena instead of cursing and being angry all all the fans said was chin up this is life we we keep moving. Thank you for your time. Congratulations again for your historic season and obviously your pathway since since your group took over the club back in 2019 can't wait to find out what you can do in the in the best club competition on the planet and we'll be following what happens on the pitch and off the pitch very keenly. Thanks a lot and all the best for the upcoming campaign. Thank you Pedro, thank you so much. I hope we can survive at least. And that'll do it for another episode of the Portugal football summit podcast hope you enjoy this conversation with Komo's president. I think we learned so much about this disruptive philosophy of managing a football club the decision making process you know what goes on behind the scenes and the I for one got brand new insight really on on the process. No doubt about that as always we ask you to follow us to subscribe our channel and to leave your comments your reactions on the video and on the audio version of the podcast as well that'll do it for us. See you again very soon. (upbeat music)