The Etihad Stadium leak that eventually fed into 115 Premier League charges against Manchester City did not start with a boardroom mole or a disgruntled executive. It started with an anonymous email, sent in September 2015, signed only “John”. Nobody receiving it knew they were reading the first message from Football Leaks.
How Football Leaks targeted the Etihad Stadium internal files
Football Leaks published confidential club documents that detailed internal emails about sponsorship deals and payments at the Etihad Stadium. The material sat behind closed doors for years before it surfaced online, and City have always disputed how it was obtained and used.
Those documents did not stay a footnote. They fed directly into the case that produced Premier League financial charges against City and, ultimately, a guilty ruling on the majority of the 115 counts the club faced. Our Premier League charges process explained covers how that case moved from allegation to verdict.
It is worth stating plainly: Football Leaks obtained this data illegally. Journalists who later handled it were open about that fact, even as they argued the public interest justified publishing what they found.
Behind the pseudonym: Rui Pinto and the Football Leaks archive
The man behind “John” was Rui Pinto, now 37, a Portuguese computer hacker who grew up in Vila Nova de Gaia and attended Escola Secundaria Almeida Garrett. Long before his name became attached to one of football’s biggest data breaches, he was simply a pupil there.
His former teacher, Mario Falcao, remembers him as unremarkable in the best sense. “Rui was a perfectly normal pupil. He was nice, with his spiky hair, he was quite sociable but not extrovert,” Falcao said. Attendance was not always his strong point, but it never held him back. “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.”
One subject stood out. “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 said. Nobody at the school could have guessed where that skill would lead.
When Pinto was named as the founder of Football Leaks in 2019, Falcao was stunned. “We were very surprised,” he said. “We weren’t imagining anything like this could happen, that he could have problems with justice.” Falcao offered a personal reflection too. “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 pointed to Pinto’s allegiance to FC Porto as part of the picture. “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.”
Portuguese journalist Antonio Varela was the first person Pinto contacted, back in September 2015. Varela recalled the moment vividly: “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 did not pretend the sourcing was clean. “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 said. He weighed the ethics carefully before deciding to report on it. “You can’t ignore that. Ethically, it’s complicated, but the public interest is more relevant than the ethical issue. That was the conclusion.”
Cross-checking millions of documents and expert dissection
Pinto did not stop at one newsroom. He shared tens of millions of Football Leaks documents with Der Spiegel journalist Rafael Buschmann, handing German reporters direct access to internal football correspondence on a scale nobody in the sport had seen before.
For Der Spiegel’s Christoph Winterbach, the first sight of that archive was overwhelming. “In the beginning it was very much a fascinating feeling of like a child in a candy store,” he said. The appeal went beyond novelty. “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.”
Excitement was not enough on its own, though. Winterbach was clear that verification had to come first. “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 and you can see if,” he said, describing a process built on repeated checking rather than a single leaked email being taken at face value. The BBC Sport detailed report sets out more of that verification work.
Future implications for Manchester City and football finance
The guilty ruling on most of the 115 counts marks the practical end point of a story that began with one anonymous email a decade ago. What began as a hack has become case law for how football finance gets scrutinised.
Reaction inside the game has been mixed, and City’s own players have not stayed silent. Rodri’s defense of City’s achievements shows how the squad views the verdict against everything they have won on the pitch. Beyond the dressing room, reactions to the financial verdict reveal how far the story has travelled outside football circles.
Whatever comes next for City, the origin of this case will keep resurfacing. It began with a hacker in Portugal, a handful of journalists willing to check his material line by line, and an email that nobody at Record’s newsroom expected to matter.
