It's worth reminding ourselves that the Manchester City case, which has rocked English football to its foundation, would never have seen the light of day without a spiky-haired college dropout turned self-taught hacker named Rui Pinto.
Had he not obtained and shared more than 70 million documents with the German magazine Der Spiegel starting in 2016, culminating in the publication of their massive "Football Leaks" investigation two years later, there would have been no investigation of City -- not by UEFA, not by the Premier League, not by any of the other bodies that may get involved once the current process is concluded.
Simply put, there would have been no legal basis for anyone to do this. We would have had an alternate reading of history -- one where City get new owners, Abu Dhabi United Group in 2009, spend a ton of money, watch their revenues skyrocket and dominate the game, all the while complying with every single financial regulation set before them. (The only exception was in 2014, when they breached UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations and eventually signed a three-year settlement agreement.)
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the City case -- whether it results in expulsion from the Premier League and Sheikh Mansour having to shell out hundreds of millions in fines and compensation, or somehow ends in the club getting most, if not all, of the charges overturned on appeal -- this should be a massive wake-up call to those running the game. The message: football needs better oversight and more transparency.
Whichever way the dust settles, this much is obvious: the system failed. Either City did participate in a massive "sham" (to quote from the verdict), effectively cheating while the system failed to notice and act, or the Premier League is so inept that it has somehow been duped by a conspiracy of legacy clubs into conducting an ultimately futile eight-year investigation. Neither outcome is good; in fact, both are embarrassingly bad for the world's most successful league.
What would better oversight and transparency look like? How about something like we have in the NFL, where information about salaries, sponsorships and other revenue is shared not just with the league, but with teams around the league itself as well as the players' union. That creates a virtuous cycle of self-policing and makes it much harder to engage in financial skullduggery. (Harder, but not impossible, as old-school San Francisco 49ers fans will confirm.)
In the Premier League, far too much is a closely guarded secret in the name of "competitive advantage" -- clubs, not just City, disclose as little as legally allowed as if they were running some normal business, not a hugely important public trust like the world's most popular sport.
All of which brings us back to Pinto.
Is it fair to call him some sort of hero, saving football from itself? He would say so; in fact, he testified in court that he views himself as a whistleblower, exposing corruption in football. On his original Football Leaks site, he wrote that "the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say enough." Except his approach to the task was distinctly scattershot, simply dumping tens of millions of documents online.
Some of these documents suggested nefarious intent and led to investigations and prosecutions. (It wasn't just about Man City, but illegal third-party ownership schemes involving a company called Doyen Sports, as well as alleged tax evasion involving Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Jose Mourinho, Luka Modric and others.)
There were documents containing nuggets of information that were interesting and possibly newsworthy, like the fact that the European Super League plot went as far back as 2016 or that Paris Saint-Germain used ethnic origin criteria when scouting players. Others still were, at best, football oddities, like the report that Liverpool put a £1 million bonus in Mario Balotelli's contract if he got sent off less than three times in a season.
Or that Ronaldo's staff (including housekeepers, chefs and drivers) had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that stopped them from revealing anything about his private life until 70 years after his death. Or that Ronaldo got paid €1.1 million by a Saudi communications company in exchange for a four-hour photo shoot, five signed shirts and two social media posts. Or that Real Madrid purposefully misrepresented the Gareth Bale fee allegedly so that Ronaldo, whose transfer fee was marginally lower, would continue to believe that he was the most expensive player of all time.
The vast majority of leaked documents were frightfully boring and of zero news value. I remember spending several hours of my life -- time I'll never get back -- reading the contract of left-back Rayan Aït-Nouri when he moved to Angers as a youth team player, a document Pinto had posted on his original Football Leaks site prior to his collaboration with Der Spiegel. There was nothing there other than the invasion of a teenage kid's privacy.
Two other factors cast shade on Pinto's work. One is his attempted extortion of Doyen Sports in 2015 -- a Lisbon court found him guilty in 2023 and handed a four-year suspended sentence -- when he contacted their CEO, Nelio Lucas, and demanded half a million Euros to keep hacked documents private. Pinto has always claimed innocence, saying he was simply trying to "verify" the documents; the court ruled otherwise.
The other is that it's still not entirely clear how he obtained the documents, whether he did it on someone's behalf or whether he was acting alone. His story has evolved over the years, originally claiming he was given the documents, then admitting he had hacked some of the victims. Here, it gets even more murky. Doyen Sports were clearly hacked; probably City too. But the sheer scale and variety of the documents suggests that, in some cases, either Pinto is some sort of genius hacker or he wasn't acting alone.
It's worth noting Pinto has also suffered as a result of his actions. He spent years hiding in Hungary, from where he was extradited to Portugal in 2019. He has made enemies around the globe. He now has a criminal record, and he says he has received multiple death threats, a claim credible enough that the Portuguese government placed him under witness protection in 2020, though his lawyers claim that those protections would cease next Saturday, Oct. 10. Pinto posted on his social media channels last Friday that he was crowdfunding to handle his security costs.
If there is some good to come out of this whole tale, it's not just that tax evaders and bad actors (if the appeals process holds up the independent panel's verdict) are brought to justice. It's that this is an opportunity for the game to regulate itself better and for tax authorities to do a better job. There's light and dark in Rui Pinto's actions, and we may never know which side was stronger in motivating him. But without him, there would be no light at the end of the tunnel and for that, we ought to be grateful.