During this international break, The Athletic is publishing a series of profiles on highly rated managers from across Europe. First up was Porto’s Francesco Farioli, part two was on Rayo Vallecano’s Inigo Perez, and part three on Middlesbrough’s Kim Hellberg. Today is the turn of Como’s Cesc Fabregas.

Cesc Fabregas’s ‘dribble’ was a one-two. He used to come short to receive the ball, attract pressure, offload a pass with the outside of his foot, run into space and ask for it back.

“I didn’t have the physique, the speed, the dribble or even the elasticity to do everything quickly,” Fabregas explained to DAZN. “I had to be one step ahead in my head and already know everything I wanted to do with the ball before it got to me.”

At Como’s ever-evolving training ground in Mozzate, the 38-year-old showed the three or four solutions he used to perform in order to evade a press. “Toni Kroos used to do this a lot,” Fabregas said, opening his body to receive the ball then shaping to go back where the pass came from.

Whenever Fabregas talks about the game, it is patently clear he has thought deeply about it for his entire life. Not just the tactical side of it, but the skill and technique that go into every single action on the pitch.

Questions don’t need to be probing and he offers forthright and detailed responses. You come away from his press conferences feeling you have learned something, thankful for the depth. In a football culture as developed and tactically-minded as Italy, you’d expect this to be welcome and to some extent it is. A new generation of Italian coaches and match analysts study Fabregas. They take ideas from him and find inspiration.

But the older ex-pros who make up the punditocracy, not to mention the greying editors who stand by and protect the Italian way of doing things, don’t seem to appreciate Fabregas’ radical honesty. Some seem to think he is showing off when all he’s doing is giving a cherished glimpse into his mind to enrich our understanding of what Como are trying to do.

In this, he is no different than one of Italy’s own, Daniele De Rossi, who is also refreshingly frank and open about issues confronting his team, Genoa, and Italian football more generally. When Fabregas does it, however, he is portrayed as showing a Catalan moral superiority.

The cultural resistance to him and the project of his club, Como, is intensifying with every win. They are an outlier in a league where almost every team plays the same (3-5-2) and almost every club has a bald or snowy-haired Italian coach who has been recycled over and over again. Fabregas seems to be considered a threat to the established order when, at 38, he has a thing or two to teach.

At the next Panchina d’Oro awards, Italy’s Golden Bench, it will be interesting to see how many of Fabregas’ peers vote for him to be named Serie A Coach of the Year. Only one foreigner has won it since it became a purely domestic award; that was Jose Mourinho in 2010 and it took an unprecedented treble at Inter to do it.

Fabregas has helped Nico Paz’s development in the past two seasons (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

Fabregas would, even at this juncture, be a worthy winner. Just 18 months on from gaining promotion to the top flight for the first time in two decades, Como have improved by 27 points this season and Champions League qualification is within their grasp. In the afterburn of a 5-0 defeat by the lake, Pisa’s Swedish coach Oscar Hiljemark, one of the few other young and foreign coaches working in Serie A, called Como “one of the best teams in Italy”. It took a fellow outsider to acknowledge the work Fabregas is doing.

This is not to say Italians, as proud as they are of their own coaching traditions, have a hard time recognising Fabregas’ contribution to Serie A. Juventus coach Luciano Spalletti, who continues to operate at the cutting edge of football even in his late sixties, was delighted to hear about Fabregas changing the dimensions of the pitch at the Sinigaglia, widening it in order to gain an advantage. It showed Fabregas’ pursuit of an edge, a devil in the detail for his opponents to reckon with. “If I were a player, I’d like to be coached by him,” Spalletti said. “50cm one side, 50cm the other. It means he wants to stretch teams out more in order to find greater opportunities to play inside. I can’t wait to go play there to compliment him on it. He’s my idol.”

When Fabregas noticed Cagliari’s ground staff let the grass grow ahead of Como’s visit, it wasn’t a criticism. Fabregas has made no secret of his admiration for their rookie coach Fabio Pisacane. It was a case of each to their own. You do what you have to do against the team with the highest possession stats in Serie A. Inevitably, however, the comment was misinterpreted, manipulated and weaponised against Fabregas. Here was an upstart purist, raised at La Masia and mentored by Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola, telling Italians how football should be played.

Regardless of Fabregas’ repeated and sincere expressions of respect for the Italian game, he is seen, by a significant and noisy section of online and mainstream media, as an avatar for football made in Barcelona. He has been portrayed as its exponent, no matter the evidence to the contrary. For instance, Fabregas couldn’t play the Barca way in Serie B, as he didn’t have the players to do it. So he adapted to them and to the style of football required to get Como out of Italy’s second division. And while it’s true Guardiola and Wenger shaped how he thinks about the game, so did Mourinho and Antonio Conte.

Fabregas’ peculiar band of critics ignore this because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

Como’s breakaway goal from a Juventus corner in February, for instance, was cited as evidence of Fabregas belatedly conforming, as if only teams from Italy study how to turn a corner they’re defending into an attack. Football is football wherever it is played, in Fabregas’ opinion. It’s not English, Spanish or German. It’s not Brazilian, Argentine or Italian. There is context, sure. Different circumstances. But the game is the same.

Fabregas is viewed by some as a provocation to the established order in Italy (Filippo MONTEFORTE / AFP via Getty Images)

Nevertheless, Fabregas is viewed as a provocation to the established order in Italy in much the same way Roberto De Zerbi was at Sassuolo; they find themselves on the other side of a culture war neither has sought to fight or participate in. When a DAZN reporter put it to Fabregas that the elder statesmen of Serie A don’t seem to get on with him, he replied: “It doesn’t seem so, no.”

That was after Como defused Roma in a game considered decisive for Champions League qualification. Gian Piero Gasperini petulantly refused to shake Fabregas’ hand afterwards. It came after Max Allegri was reportedly overheard calling Fabregas “a child” and “an idiot” after Fabregas overstepped the mark by pulling the shirt of Milan wing-back Alexis Saelemaekers when the Belgian approached his technical area. Fabregas held his hands up and apologised afterwards for the unsporting behaviour he showed in stopping an attack.

Perhaps what really got under Gasperini and Allegri’s skin was the fact Como beat Roma at the Sinigaglia and took a point against Milan at San Siro. Neither are supposed to drop points to Como. Nor are Gasperini and Allegri used to a 38-year-old coach getting the better of them.

After the win over Roma, in which the visitors were limited to a single shot on target, Fabregas explained his process. “Since I got here, I’ve been studying Italian football and all the teams,” Fabregas told DAZN. “Lots of them play man-to-man, and this has made me a better coach because I’ve gone to bed every night for three years thinking: ‘How can I help my players find solutions to teams that play man-to-man all over the pitch, teams that don’t press the goalkeeper.”

In the first half of the Roma game, Fabregas wanted his centre-back Jacobo Ramon to take his marker Stephan El Shaarawy places he didn’t wish to go. Ramon moved into midfield. He also went high on the right. The confusion it caused granted Como an advantage. Ramon won second balls and duels higher up the pitch. He joined in attacks as a spare man. “What might work today might not work tomorrow,” Fabregas admitted. It worked against Roma.

A lot has been made about the wealth behind Como. Their Indonesian benefactors are the richest in Serie A. No one since Como’s return to the top flight has had a larger net spend. When one of the Hartono brothers passed away last week, Fabregas said: “It’s thanks to them we all get to experience this.”

Despite all the studies done to show a correlation between payroll and league position, it is not a given that big spenders achieve big results. Juventus’ expensive reboot under former sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli, for instance, did not lead to a title. On the contrary: fourth place has become a struggle in each of the last two years. Fiorentina cut cheques for €90m (£78m; $104m) in the summer and unexpectedly find themselves in a relegation battle.

Como have, by contrast, built a brand, connected with a community and assembled a competitive team. Aside from Pepe Reina, the now-retired Raphael Varane and Sergi Roberto in 2024, and then Alvaro Morata last summer, they have not bought stars. Gone are the days when Como let Dele Alli try out for them. They have paid for potential instead, identifying talent early.

Nico Paz, Assane Diao, Jayden Addai, Martin Baturina and Jesus Rodriguez, for instance, moved to Italy with little to no experience at senior level. The Fabregas factor played an undoubted role in them choosing Como too. Why else would academy graduates from Real Madrid and Betis decide to entrust their development to a relatively newly-promoted Italian club?

Maxence Caqueret and Maximo Perrone were more established. But look at the work Fabregas has done with Anastasios Douvikas. Only Inter captain Lautaro Martinez has scored more goals in Serie A this season.

The rest of the team is made up of bargains found by Fabregas, sporting director Carlalberto Ludi and the analytics teams. Take goalkeeper Jean Butez, centre-back Marc-Oliver Kempf and full-backs Ivan Smolcic and Mergim Vojvoda. These are players Como picked up for €2m (£1.75m; $2.3m). Butez, in particular, has been a revelation. Lucas Da Cunha has been reinvented by Fabregas.

“Foreign owner. Foreign coach. All very foreign,” Corriere dello Sport observed. “Too much so.”

Goalkeeper Jean Butez has been a revelation (Francesco Pecoraro/Getty Images)

The only Italian to feature this season is Edoardo Goldaniga. He came on in the last minute against Fiorentina in September. As the international break loomed and with it Italy’s World Cup play-off, the need to bring through and put faith in local talent understandably returned to the fore as a discussion point in the Italian media.

Fabregas wants to be able to play Italians and yet, as he said earlier this season, finding local youngsters who are already ready to play in Serie A is difficult. It’s not his fault if academies are not producing and, in Como’s case, it is still too soon for theirs to bear fruit when their project is only a few years old.

Again, when Fabregas has held a mirror up to the Italian game, stakeholders and the commentariat have not liked what they’ve seen. Rather than a repudiation, Fabregas’ concern is a call to action, one plenty of others have made over the years. If it has largely gone unheeded, that’s not on him. It’s on the inability of the Italian football system to reform itself.

Fabregas, we shouldn’t forget, is quite literally invested in the Italian game. He is in a unique position in having a stake in the club he coaches and Como are trying to show a different way is possible, one which will, in future, include Italians as and when they emerge.

For now, they are aligning more with what we see elsewhere in Europe than in Italy. At a time when leading European teams like Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern have embraced dribbling, pressing wingers, Como are one of the few teams in Italy daring to play with quick and skilful wide men like Rodriguez and Diao in a 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1. When it comes to pressures in the final third and PPDA (passes per defensive action), they’re top of the league in those metrics. Only Inter have a more prolific attack. No one has a better defence.

And yet, rather than marvel at what Como and Fabregas are achieving, too much attention is focused on Fabregas ruffling feathers rather than the bird he holds in his hands now being in flight, soaring higher than it has ever soared before.

Como did not expect to hit these heights so soon. In the space of two seasons, they could go from preparing for Bari to Barcelona, Modena to Man City, Palermo to Paris Saint-Germain.

Accordingly, much of the last week has been spent querying whether UEFA would grant Como a licence to play at the Sinigaglia, whether they have enough homegrown players to abide by the squad lists and comply with Financial Fair Play. As headaches go, this isn’t one that has Como reaching for painkillers. They’re confident of resolving whatever regulatory issue comes up.

In the meantime, Fabregas would like everyone not to lose sight of the football. That, after all, is what has brought Como this far. “I hope you talk 99 per cent about the win and one per cent about this incident,” Fabregas said after Gasperini went straight down the tunnel after Como’s win over Roma. They didn’t. But we will, not least because Fabregas has already shown signs he could be in the elite coaching bracket very, very soon, the top one per cent.