27 August 2026
The Code-Share Era: Why Sport's Next Growth Market Is Someone Else's Audience
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
Read article →Strategy
The most interesting thing about Revolut sponsoring Como 1907 is not that it happened. It is that it happened in this sequence: infrastructure first, customer acquisition second, shirt front third.
That is not a sponsorship. That is a go-to-market strategy.
In July 2025, Revolut announced its first partnership in the sports field in Italy, joining Como 1907 as the club’s Global Banking and FX Partner. Under that initial agreement, Como adopted Revolut Business to support banking operations, supplier payments, foreign exchange transactions and player transfer payments. Then, in August 2025, Revolut and Como launched new initiatives to make the fan experience more engaging, including a welcome bonus for supporters who opened a Revolut account through the club’s promotional channel. Now, Como 1907 has named Revolut its Front-of-Shirt Partner for the 2026/27 season, the next stage of a partnership that began in 2025 when Revolut joined the club as its Official Banking and FX Partner.
Three moves. Each one deeper than the last. The shirt is the visible outcome of a relationship that was already structurally embedded before a single logo appeared on a jersey.
Before reassembling the thesis, it is worth breaking the partnership into its component parts, because the architecture is where the argument lives.
| Layer | What Revolut Provides | What Revolut Gains |
|---|---|---|
| Operational infrastructure | Revolut Business: banking, FX, supplier payments, transfer transactions | Deep integration into club financial operations; switching costs for Como |
| Consumer acquisition | Sign-up incentives for Como fans; welcome bonus on first spend | New retail account holders in Italy, a priority expansion market |
| Fan engagement | Priority ticket access, co-branded merchandise, matchday activations | Behavioral data, transaction volume, brand affinity in a high-retention community |
| Payment infrastructure | Revolut Pay across ticketing and merchandise platforms | End-to-end ownership of the commercial transaction layer |
| Brand visibility | Front-of-shirt placement, 2026/27 Champions League season | Global broadcast exposure across UEFA’s highest-reach competition |
Beyond branding, the agreement integrates Revolut Pay seamlessly across the club’s ticketing and merchandise platforms, while providing eligible account holders with priority access to home match tickets. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Revolut does not merely appear on the shirt. It sits between the fan and the purchase at every commercial touchpoint the club controls.
This is the inversion of conventional sponsorship logic. Traditional deals are bought from the outside: a brand pays for access to an audience it does not otherwise reach. Revolut has built its way in from the inside, starting with the back office, moving through the checkout, and arriving at the chest of the kit only once the relationship was already load-bearing.
The question that makes this deal commercially interesting is not why Revolut wanted a football club. It is why this football club, at this moment, given what Revolut already has.
Revolut’s 2025 annual report confirmed the title sponsorship of the Audi Revolut Formula 1 team and the expansion of its Manchester City partnership to become the Official Back of Shirt Partner, with co-branded cards and exclusive customer access. The Audi Formula 1 team named Revolut as its first title sponsor, giving the fintech company top-line branding presence across the car, race suits and broadcast coverage.
That is a significant mass-scale exposure baseline. Formula One reaches a genuinely global audience. Manchester City, one of the Premier League’s highest-revenue clubs, anchors Revolut’s presence in the world’s most commercially developed football league. Against that backdrop, Como is not an audience play. The numbers do not support that reading.
As of late 2025, Revolut had over 65 million active users across more than 48 markets, an annual revenue of $4 billion, and a reported valuation of $75 billion. The company targets 100 million retail customers by mid-2027 and entry into 30 or more new markets by 2030, backed by a $13 billion investment committed in September 2025. A company at that scale and on that trajectory does not need Como’s current audience to move its user growth numbers.
What it does need is something different: markets where it can obtain greater strategic relevance, integrate its products more deeply, and grow alongside a property rather than simply renting space on one that already exists.
Como performs that role. It is a club where Revolut arrived early enough to shape the commercial infrastructure, not just decorate it.
There is a useful analogy from private equity, even though no equity changes hands here. CVC Capital Partners, when it entered Six Nations Rugby and La Liga, was not primarily buying current revenue. It was buying trajectory, and the right to participate in the upside as the asset was commercially developed. The logic was: identify a property whose commercial potential exceeds its current monetisation, provide the capital or infrastructure to close that gap, and capture the value created.
Revolut has applied a version of that logic without taking a stake. It entered Como at a point of genuine commercial inflection.
Founded in 1907 and reborn after financial hardship in 2017, Como 1907 returned to Serie A in 2024 under the ownership of the Djarum Group. In 2019, even as Como languished in the semi-professional fourth tier, the club caught the eye of the Hartono brothers of the Djarum Group, who had a joint net worth of $43.9 billion according to Forbes’s 2025 list. The acquisition price was negligible. The transformation since has not been.
When the Hartono brothers acquired Como 1907 for approximately €800,000 in 2019, the club was playing in Serie D, its stadium was operating at reduced capacity, and from a commercial perspective it was generating less than €1 million in income per season. By 2026, Como was selling out every match, generating approximately €35 million in annual merchandise sales alone, and the club is projected to generate around €75 million in annual revenue in the upcoming season.
That trajectory is the asset Revolut is betting on. Not the current size. The rate of transformation.
The Champions League qualification accelerates the thesis materially. In the 2025/26 season, Como secured European qualification for the first time in the club’s history, ultimately finishing fourth in Serie A and qualifying for the 2026/27 UEFA Champions League. The front-of-shirt position places Revolut at the centre of Como’s global brand presentation during a season that will see the club compete in the UEFA Champions League for the first time.
Revolut did not buy into a Champions League club. It bought into a Serie A returnee and is now, without renegotiating the underlying logic of the relationship, a Champions League front-of-shirt partner.
That is venture-style timing applied to a sponsorship structure.
The deal also carries a specific implication for Italian football, and it is more positive than the headline numbers suggest.
Historically, Serie A’s international commercial power has been concentrated among a small number of legacy clubs. Deloitte’s Football Money League consistently shows Juventus, Inter and AC Milan accounting for the vast majority of Italian football’s global sponsorship and media revenues. The structural reasons are familiar: stadium capacity constraints across the league, a domestic broadcast deal that has historically underperformed the Premier League and La Liga, and a generation of underinvestment in international marketing infrastructure.
Como suggests an alternative route. Not imitation of Premier League commercial scale, but differentiation through assets Italy already possesses in abundance.
Como’s president Mirwan Suwarso has noted that merchandising revenue grew from €53,000 to crossing €10 million under the current ownership. Entering their second year in Serie A, the owners found that opportunities opened much faster and much bigger than anticipated, with international growth exceeding expectations.
The club is not trying to aggregate a passive global fanbase in the manner of a Manchester United or Real Madrid. It is building something more specific: a commercial ecosystem anchored to one of the world’s most recognisable destinations, blending football, retail, hospitality, fashion and tourism into a single proposition. Como 1907 is pioneering a model that transforms the Italian football club into a luxury tourism and entertainment destination, leveraging Lake Como’s appeal and integrating football with high-end experiences, fashion and hospitality.
The Venezia FC parallel is instructive, though Como’s ambition runs further. Where Venezia built international relevance through design identity and place-based aesthetics, Como is building an integrated commercial infrastructure around the destination itself. The shirt is one product in a broader ecosystem. Revolut, embedded across ticketing, merchandise, banking and fan engagement, sits at the intersection of most of the commercial transactions that ecosystem generates.
| Club | Route to International Relevance | Key Asset | Revolut’s Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manchester City | Premier League scale, City Football Group global network | Audience size, broadcast reach | Back-of-shirt, fan benefits |
| Audi Revolut F1 Team | Formula One global broadcast, new entrant narrative | Mass-scale reach, challenger positioning | Title sponsor, operational integration |
| Como 1907 | Place-based identity, luxury destination, cultural differentiation | Commercial ecosystem, trajectory | Infrastructure, payments, front-of-shirt |
| Venezia FC | Design, fashion crossover, city identity | Aesthetic brand, international media interest | No current Revolut presence |
| Wrexham AFC | Narrative-driven media growth, TikTok and streaming | Storytelling, brand partner entry at low valuation | No current Revolut presence |
The table makes the portfolio logic visible. Revolut is not running a single sponsorship strategy. It is running a tiered architecture: mass-scale reach at the top, operational depth in the middle, and early-stage trajectory bets at the growth edge. Como sits firmly in the third category, with the potential to migrate toward the second as the Champions League season unfolds.
There is a second dimension to this that operates independently of Como’s trajectory: Revolut’s own expansion imperative.
With over 68 million retail customers across more than 40 markets, Revolut has set a target of 100 million retail customers by mid-2027 and entry into 30 or more new markets by 2030, backed by a $13 billion investment commitment. Italy is a priority geography within that expansion. The Como partnership was announced as Revolut’s first in the sports field in Italy.
That framing is significant. The Como deal is not simply a football sponsorship. It is a market-entry instrument. The fan sign-up mechanics, the Revolut Pay integration across ticketing and merchandise, the welcome bonus tied to first spend: these are customer acquisition tools dressed in football branding. Revolut’s own Head of Growth for Strategic Partnerships has described the company’s approach as wanting to “engage in a meaningful way and make sure that we can integrate our products in order to boost the experience of our customers.”
The Como deal is that philosophy made operational. Revolut is not renting eyeballs. It is building a customer acquisition funnel with a football club as the distribution channel.
The distinction matters because it changes how the deal should be evaluated. A conventional sponsorship is measured by brand awareness metrics and broadcast impressions. This deal should be measured by Italian account activations, transaction volume through Revolut Pay, and the commercial depth of the relationship as Como’s European footprint expands. Those are product metrics, not marketing metrics.
The deal carries a structural implication that extends beyond Revolut and Como individually.
For years, the conventional wisdom in European football sponsorship was that scale precedes investment. You built the audience first, then the commercial partners arrived. The Premier League’s dominance of global sponsorship markets was taken as evidence: the biggest audiences attracted the biggest brands, and smaller leagues and clubs competed for what remained.
Como disrupts that sequencing. It attracted a globally significant fintech partner before it had a Champions League place, before it had a stadium capable of hosting UEFA competition, and before it had the kind of broadcast reach that conventional sponsorship logic would require. It attracted that partner because of what it was building, not what it had already built.
That is a meaningful signal for mid-scale European clubs sitting on underpriced assets: strong place-based identity, cultural differentiation, ambitious ownership, and a commercial trajectory that outpaces current revenue. The Wrexham model demonstrated that narrative and media growth could attract brand partners at low valuation points. Como demonstrates that operational depth and destination identity can attract partners willing to embed at the infrastructure level.
The question Serie A’s commercial leadership should be asking is not how to replicate the Premier League’s broadcast model. It is how many more Como-shaped assets exist within Italian football, and whether the commercial infrastructure exists to help them find the partners willing to bet on trajectory rather than size.
Revolut’s Como deal is elegant in its structure and logical in its sequencing. But it rests on a bet that has not yet been validated at scale: that a club can build durable international commercial relevance from place-based identity and destination economics, rather than from the accumulated audience of decades in elite competition.
Como’s commercial growth from a negligible base to a projected €75 million in annual revenue is real, and the tenfold increase in merchandise revenue alone is evidence that the strategy is generating genuine commercial momentum rather than merely attractive branding. The Champions League qualification accelerates the thesis. The Revolut front-of-shirt position, arriving precisely at the moment of Como’s first European campaign, is a reminder that timing, in sponsorship as in venture capital, is most of the return.
If the most sophisticated global brands are now willing to value growth trajectory, cultural positioning and commercial control as highly as established audience size, the more consequential question is not whether Revolut made a smart bet on Como. It is which other mid-scale European clubs are sitting on similarly underpriced assets, and who gets there first.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
More Insight
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
Read article →Talent is rarely the scarce resource in sport. The system capable of finding, developing and retaining it usually is.
Read article →Why a century of accumulated meaning is becoming football's scarcest commercial asset, and how one club is building that asset from scratch.
Read article →