Etihad Stadium leaks: How Rui Pinto exposed Manchester City

• Rui Pinto, the 37-year-old Portuguese hacker behind Football Leaks, published internal Manchester City emails covering sponsorship deals and payments.
• The Premier League found City guilty on the majority of 115 financial rule charges, built in part on those leaked documents.
• Pinto first contacted journalist Antonio Varela in September 2015, before sending tens of millions of files to Der Spiegel’s Christoph Winterbach.

Etihad Stadium leaks: three key facts behind the Football Leaks saga

Manchester City have been found guilty on the majority of 115 Premier League charges, a result traced back to one man working alone.

Rui Pinto, now 37, spent years pulling emails and financial records out of football’s biggest clubs, and City’s own Etihad Stadium operation sat among the files.

Three facts explain how one whistleblower’s archive reached this point.

• Pinto is Portuguese and built the Football Leaks site himself before publishing the material he had gathered.
• The files included internal City emails on sponsorship contracts and payments, the exact material the Premier League later used to build its case.
• City’s guilty finding on the majority of the 115 counts followed directly from evidence contained in those leaked documents.

Football Leaks: how it happened

The story starts at school, long before any leak.

Mario Falcao taught Pinto geography at Escola Secundaria Almeida Garrett and remembers a pupil who stood out for one reason.

“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,” Falcao says.

He also recalls a quieter side: “Rui was a perfectly normal pupil. He was nice, with his spiky hair, he was quite sociable but not extrovert.”

Attendance was patchy, Falcao remembers, though Pinto’s father kept things on track.

“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,” he says.

The leak itself began in September 2015.

Portuguese journalist Antonio Varela received an email at Record from an account calling itself Football Leaks, signed only with the alias John.

“It was a common day of September 2015. I was at the news room at [Portuguese sports newspaper] Record and I got an email from Football Leaks. It was strange. Then I immediately go to the site, and I can’t believe there is lots of information that you never heard or read. We made the conclusion this is very, very important,” Varela says, in an account gathered as part of a BBC Sport investigation.

From there, tens of millions of documents reached Der Spiegel journalist Christoph Winterbach.

“In the beginning it was very much a fascinating feeling of like a child in a candy store,” he says.

He remembers the City material specifically: “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.”

The expert angle: public interest outweighed the ethical debate

Every journalist who handled the files knew where they had come from. Varela is blunt about it.

“We realised that Football Leaks got the information illegally. But since the moment they publish the information on the site, that’s public information,” he says.

His newsroom weighed that against what the emails showed. “You can’t ignore that. Ethically, it’s complicated, but the public interest is more relevant than the ethical issue. That was the conclusion,” he says.

Winterbach’s team applied the same caution any serious investigation demands.

“It’s very important when you have this type of documents, this type of data, that you make a lot of cross checks, that you use some software which we did that can put it all into context,” he says.

That checking is why the emails held up years later as evidence in a Premier League hearing, rather than being dismissed as stolen and unreliable.

Falcao, watching from Portugal, still sounds surprised by where it all led. “We were very surprised,” he says of the moment Pinto was named as Football Leaks’ founder. “We weren’t imagining anything like this could happen, that he could have problems with justice.”

He offers his own theory for the motive. “I certainly wouldn’t wish him and his family to be in this situation. Perhaps it was a question of the excesses of youth, his ability with computers, and maybe an excess of club-ism,” he says.

He adds that Pinto’s support for FC Porto may have played its part: “So, you know, the fact that he supported FC Porto prompted him to commit some acts, but maybe he also felt the need for justice that young people very often do feel.”

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