The whistleblower who triggered an investigation into Manchester City Football Club, which was found guilty of all but one of 115 charges in breach of Premier League financial misconduct rules this week, will no longer be granted witness protection, it was revealed on Wednesday. Rui Pinto, 37, founder of the website Football Leaks, obtained private documents that showed City broke league rules from 2009 to 2018. The league said this included using “sham” commercial contracts “to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than 900 million pounds ($1.2bn)” with secret funding from its Abu Dhabi-based owners.
The league also said the investigation found City used schemes that enabled it to appear to be complying with financial rules. City, which could face sanctions ranging from a fine to expulsion from the league, denies wrongdoing and is expected to appeal by Friday. Pinto has been a protected witness since 2020.
So who is he and what happens to him now? Pinto is a Portuguese computer hacker and activist whose work as a public interest whistleblower has exposed corruption that served as grounds for criminal investigations in several countries. He was born and raised in Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto.
His early work focused on Portuguese football clubs Benfica and FC Porto. Pinto was mostly self-taught in computing, having never received advanced education in the field. His school geography teacher, however, recalled him being “very good in computers” and was surprised when he was named as the founder of Football Leaks in 2019.
Pinto founded the website in 2015 under the pseudonym “John” to reveal “the principal protagonists in the dishonest football industry”. He was unmasked in January 2019 when he was arrested in Budapest on a European court order for alleged attempted extortion and cybercrimes. Following his arrest, he was extradited to Portugal in March 2019 and remained in pre-trial detention until April 2020.
He was given a four-year suspended sentence in September 2023 for illegally obtaining documents, committing other cybercrimes and attempted extortion. He was later acquitted on 241 separate counts in a second trial in April 2026 after the court ruled the charges were “invalid”. The leaks revealed the salaries of Lionel Messi and Neymar.
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