Rui Pinto: Football Leaks at 11, “Exposing corruption, fraud and crime” | OneFootball

Rui Pinto, whistleblower and creator of Football Leaks, marked this Tuesday the 11th anniversary of the project’s launch with a message posted on social network X. The Portuguese hacker revisited the revelations that shook football, insisted on the persistence of problems involving power and money, and recalled the original purpose: “to expose, without filters, corruption, fraud and other criminal practices.”

Eleven years after the first revelations, Rui Pinto looks back on the path taken without treating the past as a closed chapter. Football has become a global business, but the message running through his testimony is unequivocal: beneath the glamour, doubts about accountability remain.

Recalling the launch of Football Leaks, Rui Pinto revisited the atmosphere surrounding football in 2015 and the practices the project set out to reveal. In his account, the change in the scale of the business did not eliminate the underlying problems.

“Football Leaks was launched exactly 11 years ago. On September 29, 2015, the first revelations emerged from a project that promised to expose, without filters, the corruption, fraud and other criminal practices that had been kept hidden behind the curtain. At the time, the game we all love was rotten. Third-party ownership was widespread and even FIFA, the body governing football at international level, was facing a corruption scandal that sent shockwaves around the world,” wrote Rui Pinto. “Eleven years later, much of what came to light remains part of football’s reality. Football has changed, the money has grown, the game has become a global business, but beneath the glamour, the same questions about power, money and accountability remain.”

The recollection is not merely commemorative. Rui Pinto draws a direct line between the allegations of the time and today’s reality, arguing that football’s financial growth and global reach have not resolved the issues that gave rise to Football Leaks.

That view continued in his reaction to the Manchester City case. After the club was found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges related to alleged breaches of Premier League financial regulations, Rui Pinto praised, on Friday, the role of the information disclosed through Football Leaks.

“A historic decision for English football, one that crowns the work I carried out through Football Leaks. Today, we all know that, through structural manipulation and financial manoeuvres, Manchester City did not merely circumvent the rules; they turned them into a mere formality, defying any attempt to preserve the integrity of the competition,” he wrote. “This meticulously orchestrated fraud will finally be punished, and the impact will not be merely turbulent, but truly devastating for the ‘Cityzens’. Ironically, I cannot help but remember Pep Guardiola’s words at his first press conference as City manager: ‘Fasten your seatbelts.’”

For Rui Pinto, the decision represents more than just an episode of English sporting justice: it stands as validation of the work carried out through Football Leaks. The final reference to Pep Guardiola reinforces the tone of settling scores with which the whistleblower frames the outcome.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.