Mention Rui Pinto to many Manchester City fans and they may not recognise the name.
But the Portuguese computer hacker has played a major role in one of football’s biggest financial controversies through Football Leaks, a website he created to publish confidential documents involving clubs, players and agents.
The Premier League’s financial charges against Manchester City are also linked to documents released by Pinto through Football Leaks. City has denied the allegations and is expected to appeal the reported findings.
According to the BBC, the leaked material included internal emails about sponsorship deals and payments involving Manchester City. The documents later became part of the background to the Premier League’s financial case against the club.
But Pinto’s story goes far beyond Manchester City.
The 37-year-old has spent years at the centre of a debate over whether he should be seen as a criminal hacker or a whistleblower who exposed what he described as “the hidden side of football”.
A quiet childhood
Pinto grew up in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the Douro River from Porto, Portugal.
His former geography teacher, Mario Falcao, remembers him as an ordinary student who had a strong interest in computers.
“Rui was a perfectly normal pupil. He was nice, with his spiky hair, he was quite sociable but not extrovert,” Falcao said.
“He had a good relationship with the teachers, although he did miss these classes quite often. His father was always on top of things, so in the end he passed quite easily.”
Falcao said Pinto stood out because of his computer skills.
“Certainly he was very good in computers. All the work that he did for various courses were very good, when he put his mind to it,” he said.
As a young man, Pinto lived a relatively ordinary life.
Falcao recalled that he would “go to the gym, go to McDonald’s”.
Pinto grew up in a modest family. His father, Francisco, worked in a shoe factory before becoming an antiques dealer. His mother died when he was 11.
Falcao said he was surprised when Pinto was identified in 2019 as the person behind Football Leaks.
“We were very surprised,” he said.
“We weren’t imagining anything like this could happen, that he could have problems with justice.”
Falcao suggested that Pinto’s support for FC Porto, combined with his computer skills and desire to expose wrongdoing, may have influenced his actions.
How Football Leaks started
Pinto created Football Leaks in 2015 with the stated aim of exposing “the hidden side of football”.
Portuguese sports journalist Antonio Varela was the first journalist contacted by Pinto, who used the name “John” to hide his identity.
Varela recalled receiving an unusual email from Football Leaks while working at Portuguese sports newspaper Record.
“It was a common day of September 2015. I was at the news room at Record and I got an email from Football Leaks. It was strange,” he said.
He visited the website and found documents that had not previously been made public.
“We made the conclusion this is very, very important,” Varela said.
The material created a difficult question for journalists: could information obtained illegally still be published if it was in the public interest?
“We realised that [Football Leaks] got the information illegally. But since the moment they publish the information on the site, that’s public information,” Varela said.
“You can’t ignore that. Ethically, it’s complicated, but the public interest is more relevant than the ethical issue.”
Football Leaks initially focused on Portuguese clubs, including Benfica and Pinto’s supported club, FC Porto.
It later expanded to documents involving some of football’s biggest names, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar.
Millions of documents
Pinto eventually made contact with Rafael Buschmann, a journalist at German magazine Der Spiegel.
After developing trust with Buschmann, Pinto shared tens of millions of documents with him.
A team of journalists in Hamburg then worked through the material and produced a series of reports that attracted worldwide attention.
Christoph Winterbach, a data journalist involved in the project, described his first experience with the documents.
“In the beginning it was very much a fascinating feeling of like a child in a candy store,” he said.
“If you’re a football fan, if you’re a sports journalist, it was amazing to see the actual documents, to see those emails where things are negotiated and to get a real look behind the curtain, how things work.”
However, Winterbach said the journalists had to check the documents carefully before publishing their findings.
“It’s very important when you have this type of documents, this type of data, that you make a lot of cross checks,” he said.
“We always need to make sure that it’s authentic material and whenever we publish something about it, it needs to be in the public interest to start writing.”
Pinto eventually provided more than three terabytes of information to Der Spiegel and other media organisations involved in the European Investigative Collaborations network.
Winterbach met Pinto in person in 2019 while he was being held in prison in Lisbon.
He later interviewed him again at a secret location while Pinto was in witness protection.
Winterbach described Pinto as friendly, intelligent and highly focused.
“He’s one of the most important whistleblowers that we have in Europe or maybe the world,” he said.
Hacker or whistleblower?
Pinto’s actions have produced very different opinions.
Former Portuguese politician and diplomat Ana Gomes has supported him and argued that he should be protected as a whistleblower.
“What he has exposed is very important. In Portugal, definitely he is by far the most important whistleblower,” Gomes said.
She argued that Pinto had helped authorities in other European countries investigate alleged corruption and criminal activity.
On the Manchester City case, Gomes said she was not concerned about how Pinto obtained the club’s documents.
“I couldn’t care less. If they have nothing to hide, what’s their problem?” she said.
However, retired journalist Jose Carlos Freitas offered a very different view.
“For the majority of the people, they look at him as a thief,” he said.
“For some people, he is a kind of hero, a Robin Hood, you can say because he was exposing the dark side of the business of so many clubs.”
Varela offered a more mixed assessment.
“Nowadays, I think I put him in the middle [between whistleblower and criminal hacker] because he got the information illegally,” he said.
“But he gave us, all of us, a view, a dark view of European football, so he did a job to the society illegally.”
Arrest and convictions
Pinto’s activities eventually led to criminal proceedings against him.
He was arrested in Hungary in 2019 and extradited to Portugal. He spent time in solitary confinement, was later placed under house arrest and eventually entered witness protection.
In 2023, following his first trial in Portugal, Pinto received a four-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence.
A separate trial in France resulted in a six-month suspended prison sentence.
At another trial in Lisbon, Pinto arrived with members of his witness protection team while armed police were present in court.
Rui Patricio, a lawyer representing Benfica, described Pinto as “no more, no less than a burglar” and accused him of obtaining information through “illegal and condemnable methods”.
Outside court, Patricio said Pinto was a hacker and argued that his actions were criminal.
Pinto’s lawyer, Francisco Texeira da Mota, accepted that his client was “not a hero and not a saint” but argued that his actions had brought “advantages for society”.
How Manchester City became involved
Football Leaks eventually became linked to the Premier League’s financial case against Manchester City.
The Premier League charged City in February 2023 with more than 100 alleged breaches of its financial rules. The club has denied the charges.
Pinto has followed the case from witness protection.
His lawyer said a favourable outcome would matter to Pinto because it could show that the information he released had helped expose issues within football.
Former Manchester City financial adviser Stefan Borson said the Premier League case could have serious consequences for the club if its main allegations were proven.
“I think for City, really, the whole of the Sheikh Mansour era is at stake if the core allegations are proven against the club,” Borson said.
However, Borson rejected the idea that Pinto should be treated as a freedom fighter.
“We know that what he carried out was a criminal act and he’s been prosecuted for it,” he said.
The debate over Pinto remains divided between those who focus on how he obtained the information and those who focus on what the information revealed.
What is clear is that Football Leaks changed the way the public saw the business side of football.
From a computer in Budapest, Pinto released millions of confidential documents and became a central figure in investigations that have had a lasting impact on some of the biggest clubs and names in the sport.