Serie A rewards Cesc Fabregas, fans split: fiery debate also involves national team
The Serie A League has named Cesc Fabregas “Coach of the Month” for the month of March, an award that photographs Como’s growth and the increasingly evident hand of the former Arsenal and Barcelona midfielder, who has been guiding the Larians from the bench since November 2023. An award whose reasons from the point of view of results are obvious (Como has won all three league matches played, bringing itself into the Champions League zone), but which on social media has generated a heated debate, creating almost a national case.
On the one hand, in fact, there are those who applaud the work of the Catalan coach and see in Como one of the few realities capable of proposing a modern, offensive soccer, built on the desire to attack rather than on the fear of losing, even sometimes at the expense of the final result. On the other hand, however, a slice of fans experience this award as yet another confirmation of a paradox: according to critics, celebrating Como, whose only Italian in the rotation is defender Edoardo Goldaniga, among other things almost never on the field, does not help the rebirth of Italian soccer.
The issue is considered delicate, from a sporting point of view, in light of the national team’s third consecutive failure to qualify for the World Cup. For some fans, rewarding an entirely foreign project means ignoring the structural problem: Italy is no longer producing talent because it cannot find space to grow it. On social media, the comments are in some cases even very harsh: “How can we get out of the crisis if we keep exalting teams without Italians? The award to Fabregas is deserved, but the system has lost again,” one reads, for example, under the posts of Lega Serie A.
On the other hand, there are also those who completely reverse the perspective. For several fans, it is precisely Como that represents a possible way out of the crisis: “A club that has built a recognizable playing identity, works methodically, invests in facilities and skills, could become an ideal laboratory for inserting, gradually, young Italians in a high-level technical context,” one reads on social media.
The topic is bound to still cause discussion and to go beyond the Como case or Fabregas’ name: the “Coach of the Month” award, however, has brought the case back to the center of the football debate.
