Long before Manchester City faced 115 charges from the Premier League over alleged financial rule breaches, a largely unknown Portuguese computer enthusiast was quietly gathering an extraordinary archive of confidential football documents….
Long before Manchester City faced 115 charges from the Premier League over alleged financial rule breaches, a largely unknown Portuguese computer enthusiast was quietly gathering an extraordinary archive of confidential football documents.
His name was Rui Pinto.
Pinto, a self-taught computer enthusiast and former history student, became the central figure behind Football Leaks, a website launched in 2015 that published confidential documents relating to football clubs, players, agents and administrators.
Between 2015 and 2018, he shared millions of documents, with material eventually reaching investigative journalists across Europe.
Among the most consequential revelations concerned Manchester City.
In 2018, German publication Der Spiegel reported allegations that Manchester City and its sponsors had manipulated sponsorship arrangements in ways that could circumvent UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules.
The material was based on emails obtained by Pinto, who operated Football Leaks under the pseudonym “John”.
The revelations became the starting point for investigations that ultimately extended beyond UEFA to the Premier League.
From Football Leaks to the Manchester City investigation
The Premier League subsequently investigated Manchester City’s finances and, in February 2023, charged the club with 115 alleged breaches of its financial rules covering the period from 2009 to 2018, alongside allegations that City failed to co-operate with the league’s investigation.
The charges were not themselves proof of wrongdoing.
Manchester City has consistently denied the allegations and maintained that it has a comprehensive body of evidence supporting its position.
The Pinto revelations had already triggered a separate UEFA case.
In 2020, UEFA found City guilty of Financial Fair Play breaches and imposed a two-year ban from European competitions and a €30 million fine.
City appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which overturned the competition ban and reduced the fine to €10 million.
CAS said some alleged breaches were not established or were time-barred, while also finding that City had failed to co-operate with UEFA’s investigation.
The Premier League case was separate and involved a much broader set of allegations.
Who is Rui Pinto?
Pinto was not a traditional investigative journalist.
He was a computer enthusiast who acquired access to private digital systems and documents and subsequently supplied much of the material to journalists.
His activities extended well beyond Manchester City.
Football Leaks exposed information concerning players including Lionel Messi and Neymar, third-party ownership arrangements, football agents and clubs, while documents also revealed discussions surrounding the proposed European Super League.
The material was shared with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, allowing journalists to examine and publish the information.
The scale was extraordinary. The Guardian reported that the archive contained more than 70 million documents, while the BBC has reported that Pinto shared about 18.6 million documents between 2015 and 2018.
The leaks also extended beyond football, including the investigation known as the Luanda Leaks, which examined financial dealings surrounding Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos.
Arrest and prosecution
Pinto’s activities eventually caught up with him.
He was arrested in Budapest, Hungary, in January 2019 and later extradited to Portugal.
He spent roughly a year in pre-trial detention before being released and eventually entering Portugal’s witness-protection programme.
In September 2023, a Portuguese court sentenced him to four years in prison, suspended, after finding him guilty of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and violations of correspondence.
He was convicted on five counts involving unlawful access to computer systems and three relating to correspondence violations.
The case also involved allegations that he attempted to obtain between €500,000 and €1 million from Doyen Sports in exchange for not publishing compromising material.
Pinto has portrayed himself as a whistleblower acting in the public interest.
But the Portuguese court drew a distinction between exposing information and the methods used to obtain it, with the judge stating that freedom to inform did not justify violations of privacy.
From convicted hacker to protected witness
An unusual turn came after his conviction.
Pinto agreed to co-operate with Portuguese investigators and provided access to encrypted hard drives containing material gathered through Football Leaks.
He subsequently became a protected witness and has lived under police protection, according to reports.
His legal troubles, however, did not end there. The Guardian reported in September 2026 that Pinto had recently been acquitted in a second trial involving 241 charges connected to his activities as the source behind Football Leaks.
A controversial legacy
Pinto remains a deeply controversial figure.
Supporters see him as a whistleblower whose disclosures forced greater scrutiny of the finances and governance of elite football. Critics point to the unauthorised access to private computer systems and the privacy implications of publishing material obtained through those methods.
What is less disputed is the scale of his impact.
A young Portuguese computer enthusiast operating behind the pseudonym “John” helped expose an enormous body of confidential football material. His disclosures supplied journalists with documents concerning Manchester City that helped trigger investigations by UEFA and the Premier League.
And years after Football Leaks first emerged, Pinto’s name remains attached to one of the most consequential financial investigations in modern English football — the Premier League’s 115-charge case against Manchester City.
As the City case continues through its legal process, the story of Rui Pinto illustrates the unusual path by which information gathered by a computer hacker can move from encrypted hard drives, through investigative newsrooms, and eventually into the centre of a dispute involving one of the world’s biggest football clubs.
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