Millions of secret documents: how Rui Pinto shook Manchester City's world
The man who terrified Europe's biggest clubs
Mention the name Rui Pinto to a Manchester City fan outside the Etihad Stadium and you will likely draw a blank. The English supporter may not know who this man is, or perhaps has never heard of him. His club, though, knows exactly what he did.
Pinto, the Portuguese hacker who became one of the most controversial figures in European football, masterminded leaks that shook clubs, players and agents, with their echoes reaching the heart of one of the biggest financial cases in Premier League history.
From behind his computer screen, Pinto accessed an enormous volume of confidential documents and emails, then published some of them through his well-known website "Football Leaks". A long journey of investigations, courts, prisons and witness protection programmes began.
Manchester City ranked among the most prominent clubs whose documents surfaced in those leaks. Internal correspondence linked to sponsorship deals and financial payments was revealed, information that later became part of the major controversy over the club's compliance with financial rules.
As the repercussions of the case rumble on, Pinto has found himself at the heart of a story that goes beyond football itself. Is he a criminal who stole information illegally, or a whistleblower who revealed to the public what was happening behind closed doors?
BBC Sport travelled across Europe in search of the man behind this story. They met one of his former teachers, a Portuguese politician who defended his right to protection as a whistleblower, journalists who dealt with the leaks, and a former financial adviser at Manchester City, and followed one of his trial hearings from close up.
Early talent in front of the computer
At first glance, it is hard to imagine that the child who grew up in modest circumstances in Portugal could become, years later, one of the most controversial people in European football. But Mario Falcao, Rui Pinto's former geography teacher, still remembers him from his school years.
Falcao describes Pinto as "a completely ordinary pupil", pleasant and fairly sociable, but not overly open. His relationship with his teachers was good, despite his frequent absences from lessons, while his father followed his academic affairs closely, which ultimately helped him pass his studies with ease.
One aspect clearly drew attention: his talent for dealing with computers. Falcao says: "Certainly, he was very skilled with the computer. All the work he produced for his subjects was excellent when he focused on it."
Pinto, according to his former teacher, lived a life exactly like that of his peers. He went to the sports club, frequented McDonald's restaurants, and lived out the details of an ordinary teenager.
He grew up in the "Vila Nova de Gaia" area, on the bank of the Douro River opposite the city of Porto, Portugal's second largest city. There, in a street lined on both sides with houses whose facades were clad in tiles and topped with terracotta roofs, he spent part of his childhood.
His school, "Escola Secundaria Almeida Garrett", enjoyed a good reputation among local residents, so much so that some called it "the university".
His father Francisco worked in a shoe factory before moving into the antiques trade, while Pinto lost his mother when he was eleven years old. Falcao never imagined that his former pupil would, years later, become a name known in the corridors of the courts and in the world's media.
When Pinto's identity emerged in 2019 as the founder of "Football Leaks", the shock hit his teachers and acquaintances hard. Falcao says: "We felt a great surprise. We did not imagine that something like this could happen, or that he might face legal problems."
He then tries to explain the great transformation in his pupil's life, saying: "Perhaps it was to do with the recklessness of youth, and his skill in using computers, and perhaps also with a degree of excessive fanaticism for the club."
Pinto supported Porto, and perhaps this affiliation played a role in some of his actions, but his former teacher believes the matter may have gone beyond mere support of a club. He adds: "Perhaps he also felt that need for justice that young people often feel."
From Porto to the world: the birth of Football Leaks
In 2015, Pinto took the step that would change his life forever. He founded the Football Leaks website, which he said came with the aim of exposing "the hidden side of football".
At first, no one knew the identity of the person behind the site. He used a pseudonym, "John", and began contacting journalists and sending them documents in a way that aroused both curiosity and suspicion.
Antonio Varela, the Portuguese journalist, was the first person Pinto contacted. Varela remembers that moment today as if it happened yesterday. It was an ordinary day in September 2015, when he was working in the newsroom of the Portuguese sports newspaper "Record", before an email from "Football Leaks" reached him.
He entered the site, and the surprise was enormous. Varela says: "I couldn't believe the amount of information that I had never heard or read about before. And we concluded that this was extremely important." But dealing with this material was not easy. The journalists knew the information had been obtained illegally, which created a complex ethical and legal dilemma.
Nevertheless, Varela felt that publishing the information had become a matter of public interest. He says: "We realised that Football Leaks had obtained the information illegally. But once the information was published on the site, it became public information. You cannot ignore that. Ethically, the matter is complex, but the public interest takes priority over the ethical side."
Manchester City was not the only target
Pinto did not begin his journey by targeting Manchester City, and the English club was not the only victim of his leaks. Early on, the published material focused on local matters in Portugal, among them documents linked to Benfica, and even the club Pinto himself supported, Porto.
Matters soon took on global dimensions. Documents and emails appeared linked to the names of some of football's biggest stars and its most famous clubs and agents, among them Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar.
Then came the moment when the scope of the leaks expanded enormously. Pinto trusted the journalist Rafael Buschmann of the German magazine "Der Spiegel", and once he felt he could trust him, he opened before him huge vaults of documents, and shared with him tens of millions of files.
At Der Spiegel's headquarters in the city of Hamburg, a team of journalists began examining the material, analysing it and linking the information together, resulting in a number of the most controversial investigations in the world of football.
Christoph Winterbach, the journalist specialising in data analysis, was one of the team members. Winterbach says that dealing with this enormous quantity of documents was at first like a dream for a sports journalist.
He adds that seeing the actual emails in which negotiations took place, and viewing the documents that revealed what was happening behind the scenes, was an exceptional experience.
The volume of information imposed an enormous responsibility. The journalists had to conduct cross-verification processes, and use software and data analysis to confirm the authenticity of the documents and place them in their correct context, before publishing any piece of information. The basic question was always: are the materials genuine? And does publishing them serve the public interest?
What Pinto provided was not merely a limited number of files. According to the investigation, he provided more than 3 terabytes of information to Der Spiegel and other media institutions within the European Investigative Collaborations network.
An enormous volume of data, roughly equivalent to thousands of copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. More important than the volume of information was its impact. The documents did not only reveal financial details or internal correspondence, but gave journalists a rare window onto the way parts of the football industry are run away from the public eye.
Here the real controversy over Pinto's character began. Was the aim to reveal the truth? Or does the method he used to access that information make him a criminal, whatever the results of the leaks?
Hero or thief?
Everywhere Pinto's story reached, sharply contradictory points of view emerged. Ana Gomes, the former Portuguese politician and diplomat and former member of the European Parliament, met Pinto in prison and testified on his behalf in one of his trials.
Gomes believes the man deserves protection as a whistleblower, not prosecution. She said in Lisbon that what Pinto revealed was extremely important, and described him as the most important whistleblower in Portugal.
She believes he should have been treated as an ally of the judicial authorities and criminal investigations, especially since he helped other European authorities access information that enabled the pursuit of corruption and crimes.
Asked about her position on Manchester City, after the club's emails were hacked, her response was direct: "I don't care about that at all. If they have nothing to hide, what is their problem?"
Not everyone shares this view. The retired journalist Jose Carlos Freitas says that the majority of people view Pinto as a thief, while others see in him a figure resembling "Robin Hood", because he exposed what he described as the dark side of business in football.
Varela, who was among the first journalists to deal with Pinto, places him in a middle ground. He says Pinto obtained the information illegally, but at the same time presented a bleak picture of European football, which he considers a service to society, even though the means used to access the information was illegal.
Prison, protection and a permanent shadow
Regardless of one's position on Pinto, the years that followed the revelation of his identity were not easy at all. In 2019, Hungary arrested him and handed him over to Portugal, and since that time he has passed through various stages, including solitary confinement and house arrest, before later entering a witness protection programme.
In his first trial in Portugal, in 2023 a court gave him a four-year suspended prison sentence, after convicting him of charges including attempted extortion, illegal access to data, and violation of the confidentiality of correspondence.
A few months later, he faced a separate trial in France, which ended with him being sentenced to six months' suspended imprisonment. But the story did not end there. In January of last year, Pinto's latest trials began in Lisbon, and the details of the hearing were enough to reveal the scale of the change that had occurred in his life.
He arrived at the court accompanied by members of a witness protection team, while two of them remained inside the courtroom throughout the hearing, amid tight security measures. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, jeans and brown shoes, with his famous hairstyle and some facial hair.
He sat quietly, with rigid features most of the time, and did not speak except when asked to confirm some personal details. Asked about his place of residence, he explained that he could not disclose it for security reasons.
These measures were less strict than his first trial, which saw him wearing a bulletproof vest, while snipers were positioned on the roof of the building.
In court, some saw the case as simple and not in need of all this controversy. Rui Patricio, the lawyer for Benfica, described Pinto as "neither more nor less than a thief", affirming that he obtained the information by illegal means.
He said outside the court that their argument was simple: Pinto is a "hacker", and what he did is a crime that cannot be justified by the results that came from it. The defence lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota did not try to present his client as an ideal figure.
Rather, he acknowledged before the court that Pinto is "neither a hero nor a saint", but at the same time he stressed that what he revealed provided benefits to society. And so the question remained hanging: can the means be illegal, while the information that was revealed has real value for the public interest?
Manchester City: the case that brought Pinto back to the fore
About a decade after Football Leaks launched, the effects of the leaks are still present. Among their most prominent results is the case brought by the Premier League against Manchester City, considered one of the biggest and most important financial cases in the history of the competition.
Speaking with Pinto's legal team after one of the trial hearings, it became clear that he is following the case closely, despite being under a witness protection programme.
Asked about the importance of the outcome of the Manchester City case for his client, his lawyer said the matter is important to him, because Pinto lives an extremely difficult life, and is forced to hide, after playing a role in revealing important information, especially regarding the English club. He added that Pinto wants to feel that what he did had a real impact, and that the information he revealed brought about change.
Stefan Borson, the former financial adviser at Manchester City, was more reserved in his assessment of Pinto's role. He said the man should not be presented as a "hero defending freedom", affirming that what he did was a criminal act for which he was tried.
Borson believes that hackers of this kind may sometimes present themselves as defenders of freedom of expression as part of a defensive strategy, but once the documents come to light, the responsibility for dealing with them falls within the remit of the authorities.
Opinions on Rui Pinto may differ radically. There are those who see him as a hacker who committed crimes to access information he had no right to obtain, and there are those who consider him a whistleblower who revealed to the public a hidden side of the football industry.
Others stand in the middle, acknowledging that the means was illegal, but who believe the results opened the door to investigations, cases and questions that would not have emerged in the same way were it not for those leaks.
Beyond this ethical and legal controversy, there is a fact that is hard to ignore: Rui Pinto, the Portuguese man who grew up in modest circumstances, and who from a young age enjoyed a striking talent for dealing with computers, managed to leave an enormous mark on world football.
He sat behind his computer, accessed confidential information, then sent it to journalists around the world. From there, the story emerged from the computer screen to the pages of the newspapers, and from there to the offices of the clubs and federations, then to the courtrooms.
As for Manchester City, whose ordinary fans may not know the name Rui Pinto, the club found itself for years facing the repercussions of information that emerged from the world of "Football Leaks".
As the courts continue to issue their rulings, and football continues to face its questions concerning money, influence and transparency, Pinto's name remains present in one of the most controversial stories in the history of the modern game. "One man, one computer, and millions of documents. That was the beginning. As for the ending, it is still open."
