This is an updated version of an article published on June 12, 2020
To his enemies, he is a criminal, a bandit with a laptop and an anarchist’s lust for chaos.
To his supporters and sympathisers, he is a hero, a moral crusader who was brave enough to shine a light upon the shadowy hinterlands of the world’s favourite sport.
In the world of Rui Pinto, the man behind the Football Leaks revelations, nothing is ever cut and dried. He gained access to tens of millions of private documents, yet he is adamant he is not a hacker. His lawyers call him “a great European whistleblower”, but he has also been convicted of attempted extortion in Portugal. To describe him as a complex character would be to undersell things by an order of magnitude.
This much, however, is crystal clear: Pinto is unlikely to slip into irrelevance any time soon.
For one thing, we are still feeling the aftershocks from a series of exposes published by German magazine Der Spiegel, based on information shared by Pinto.
Manchester City can attest to the far-reaching consequences of his actions. The release of documents and emails obtained by Pinto prompted a UEFA investigation that eventually led to City being banned from European competitions for two years. That decision was overturned on appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020.
That was not the end of the story. On Friday, it was revealed that an independent commission had found City guilty of 114 of 115 violations of Premier League financial...
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