Twelve months on from being part of a failed takeover bid at Arsenal, Thierry Henry has made his foray into ownership by becoming a shareholder of upwardly-mobile Serie B club Como.
He had taken on a prominent role in Spotify owner Daniel Ek’s £1.8bn attempt to purchase the Gunners, which the incumbent Kroenke family gave short shrift to last September despite the club’s record goalscorer promising that Ek was prepared to bide his time.
But after a conversation with Cesc Fabregas, who signed a two-year playing deal with Como at the beginning of August that includes shares, the 45-year-old has committed to investing in another club that has big plans to restore itself to previous glories.
“It always looked like it would be the next step but you never know where it’s going to go,” Henry tells Mirror Football of his aspirations to become a club owner.
The decision to select a small Italian club that was most recently in the top flight 20 years ago may seem odd at first glance but for Henry, who will remain assistant coach at Belgium and continue punditry work, there were several stand out selling points.
“At the press conference [to announce his investment] they asked ‘Why here?’ It was because I got an offer. It’s the same with Belgium. I got an offer to work. You evaluate it like anyone. Let me see what is it first, what does it stand for, what will I do, what is it, how does it look and you value it and you speak to your people and you never know where.”
The mastermind behind Como’s rise has been former Chelsea midfielder Dennis Wise. The chief executive was given a clean slate not long after the club was purchased by Indonesia’s richest family in 2017 and they have risen quickly from the semi-pro ranks to chasing top-flight promotion in the next three years.
Fabregas arrived at the beginning of the month following initial enquiries with his, and Henry’s, agent Darren Dein about another player, the defender Luis Binks.
After Binks, a Tottenham academy graduate, signed on loan from Bologna in mid-July, Wise and Fabregas had a video call and the Spanish World Cup winner was quickly sold on the long-term vision for the club. There are plans to rebuild their stadium, which is full of character but partially closed due to disrepair, and builders are working around the clock to complete a new training ground that Wise was initially asked to pay €2.5m for but ended up doing a deal for €1m.
By 2025 the club is determined to ensure all suppliers are local, they have invested heavily in community projects, are working to alleviate problems with homelessness and during the peak of the pandemic made a six-figure donation to a nearby hospital. That, senior figures in the ownership group say, is just the beginning.
For Henry it was the off-field plans that made this particular deal the right one.
“You’ve heard it all before, ‘We’re trying to go back up, we’re going to have a new stadium, a new training facility, we’ll bring the academy back.’ Then they started speaking to me about the community part of it and I thought ‘Wow, this is a bit different to what you usually hear.’ That for me made the difference,” he says.
“Darren was the whole brain behind it. Dennis signed Luis Binks, who I had at Montreal, and that’s how it all started. With Darren’s brain he thought something else can happen. Cesc arrived and we talked about the possibility.”
Sitting on the roof of a hotel overlooking the lake a couple of hours before Fabregas and Patrick Cutrone, the hometown boy signed from Wolves, make their debuts in a 1-0 defeat to Brescia on Monday night, Henry insists that he will not be meddling in the running of the club but is more than happy for Wise to pick his brain when required.
“The area is nice but I also know my football,” he says. “More often than not when you talk about Como it’s to go for a weekend. It’s magnificent, the food is crazy. But it’s about time for this to again have a great club. The history is great, it’s an old club. I think this is the right way to restart, people coming along is really important.
“But I’m a shareholder. I’ve been on the bench, alongside the coach, I’ve played, I’ve been a pundit. I know it’s vital to stay in your lane. When Dennis wants to know something or pick my brain I’ll be here but I’m not going to be the guy ‘hey what's this?’ It’s important every time to know your role and not overstep.
“If it’s something you feel you need to talk about in a meeting, talk about it, but you have a team. The big boss is the big boss. If we’ll have a discussion, we’ll have a discussion but Dennis is in charge of the football of the club. If a call, a cup of tea or board meeting is arranged then it’s going to be.
“If I was any other shareholder you wouldn’t have even seen a shareholder give a press conference. I understand what it is, what I represent and what the game represents for me but sometimes you don’t even know who shareholders are.”
