F.C Como Women is a women’s football team, independent in the sense that it is not connected to the men’s club, and since March 2024 has been controlled by the investment vehicle Mercury/13.
Como Women plays in the women’s Serie A, which became a professional league a couple of years ago, and is led as CEO by Elena Mirandola, who manages it as if it were a start-up capable of growing rapidly by introducing an innovative business model and a series of technologies to support the project and the people who work there: management team, technical staff and, of course, the players.
“Mercury/13 is led by Victoire Cogevina Reynal and Mario Malavé and has the ambitious project of acquiring other women’s football clubs in all the main European leagues: France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, it is participated by names such as Giorgio Chiellini and international investors and its first operation was precisely the acquisition of the majority of Como Women,” Mirandola tells Startupbusiness. The founders of Mercury/13 have experience both in the management of athletes and in finance, and the new project started with an action to support the start of the new season, with a deep rebranding action and with the aim of making the club a vehicle capable of decisively conveying the message of female empowerment’.
Como Women was previously owned by a Como entrepreneur who achieved the important result of bringing the team into the top league, and now the new ownership is working to give the club not only a new identity and a new positioning, but also a role that, while maintaining the focus on sport and results, the goal of the season is to arrive among the top 5 teams in the league where 10 clubs are playing for the title. “The business model of a women’s club,” the CEO continues, “is very different from the men’s clubs, we work much more on the sponsorship front because items such as ticket or season ticket sales, stadium experience and especially TV rights are not as relevant in women’s football. So we work to make the club also a sort of media capable of promoting, as we said, women’s empowerment, but also its link with the territory, which in our case is an element of great value at an international level, and also becoming a brand linked to style, the same logo that we have redesigned is very reminiscent of those of companies in the fashion industry for example, for us communication is fundamental, creating a fan base with which to share values of gender equality is key to the strategy’.
An in-depth analysis on the business of European women’s football clubs was conducted by Deloitte, which highlights how the overall budgets are often very different. The richest club is Barcelona Feminì with a total turnover of more than 13 million euros, but this is almost an isolated case because already in the ranks of the runners-up the numbers are halved: Manchester United 8 million, Real Madrid 7.4 million, Manchester City and Arsenal 5.3 million and then downwards, with numbers ranging between half a million and one and a half million. The research also analyses the sources of revenue confirming that on average, commercial revenue, i.e. from sponsors and merchandising, weighs 58%, match-related activities 22% and TV rights, again on average, 20%.
Another research recently published by Visa highlights how the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 has contributed nearly $1.9 billion to global GDP, created over 38,000 jobs and added $932 million to household incomes. With the economic influence of women’s football increasing year on year,” the research continues, “the upcoming UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 has the potential to be an important moment for the sport, in a study entitled The Compound Effect in Women’s Football, Visa highlights the most important factors influencing women’s football: sponsorship has grown at a rapid pace, with brands recognising the potential of the game; media rights are increasingly making their mark with new deals and investors; and increased investment has fostered the evolution of the game on the field and improved the experience of professional players. More matches played in bigger stadiums have meant better broadcasting and a more engaging experience for fans, both physical and digital.
Just by interviewing seven thousand fans in seven countries Visa found that: more than half of women’s football fans (53%) have only developed an interest in it in the last three years, a percentage that rises to 62% among 18-24 year olds. Almost half (44%) of the fans expect to significantly increase their involvement in the next three years. Seven out of ten fans (70%) believe that brands help to increase the visibility of the sport, while two thirds (67%) think they are essential for its development. Fans of the women’s game have greater spending power, spending 71% more on sports merchandise and 41% more on entertainment than the general UK population that was used as a benchmark in the research.
With the acquisition of Como Women by Mercury/13, the management team has been entirely renewed and the company is completing the operational team by focusing on a high level of professionalisation and the use of technology both to strengthen communication with the use of social networks and taking great care of strategy and positioning, as well as making the daily work more efficient with management systems, the use of machine translation systems, and the renovation of the training facilities with the support of Nike and Technogym, who are partners of the Como club. “We are a decidedly lean organisation of about 50 people, so it is essential that we use technology to make every operational aspect as efficient as possible and ready to always give timely answers to the players who are a bit like ‘my clients’ because it is very important to me that they choose to play in our club, that they are comfortable, that they can grow and become an integral part of the project as a whole”.
The club’s players are both Italian and foreign, with even some arriving during the last purchase campaign, and all are naturally professionals and involved in the activities that the club carries out to give substance to its project.
“The objectives are to build a new fan base alongside the historical one, the target audience is both young women up to 25 years old who are sensitive to issues related to gender equality and sport, and this is where social networks such as Instagram and TikTok come into play, but also collaborations with universities and partnerships with content creators on which we are working. And then there is an audience that is also female but more mature, between 25 and 50 or so, made up of women who also have a career and a high level of education and perhaps international, so we are not only looking at the Italian market, and always very sensitive to gender equality issues. Today we already have a number of sponsors who have joined the project and we are actively working on identifying the main jersey sponsor, the activities are all managed by an internal marketing team that functions just like a media and creative agency, there is a creative director and the activities we do with the sponsors are numerous and diverse, the team thus becomes a sort of media that amplifies messages related to sport, women’s empowerment and gender equalityall perfectly embedded in the sporting activity that is of course central, so we doubled the budget for the technical staff: coaches, trainers, medical area, sports director, and invested in the tools to support the players: nutrition, the new gym’.
The new ownership and management of the Larian club has decided to focus on the new squad of players: ‘We have increased the players’ budget, and we now have a very interesting squad, we aim to be among the top five in the Italian league, so the sporting ambition is very strong, we closed the squad about a fortnight ago, now we expect a running-in period, but we have players with very high levels of maturity and professionalism that I am sure will take us far.
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