Who is Rui Pinto: the hacker who brought down the Manchester City empire

An ordinary Portuguese man with a laptop triggered the biggest leak in football history, exposed the secrets of superstars and top clubs, investigated the alleged rape involving Ronaldo, ended up behind bars, and years later his documents helped prove the scale of Manchester City’s financial violations. Now Rui Pinto is losing state protection, raising millions of euros for his own security and preparing to disappear to an undisclosed location.

Rui Pinto’s story is a years-long thriller involving hacking attacks, football millions, courtrooms, prison and revelations that turned out to be bigger every time.

It began with an unknown Portuguese student of history who felt far more at home in front of a computer than in a university lecture hall.

Then came the mysterious John, who began dumping football contracts, emails, agents’ documents and financial agreements onto the internet—material that was never meant to be seen by outsiders.

After that came Football Leaks, tens of millions of documents, Der Spiegel, Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho, PSG, offshore companies, tax investigations, Manchester City, an international arrest warrant, Budapest, a Portuguese prison, court proceedings and a witness-protection programme.

And now Pinto has found himself at perhaps the strangest point in his story.

On September 29, 2026, the Premier League announced the decision of the independent commission in the Manchester City case. The club was found guilty of serious financial violations spanning nine seasons, from 2009/10 to 2017/18, as well as most of the charges relating to its failure to properly cooperate with the investigation.

The commission found that City used sham commercial arrangements, inflated revenues and understated expenses. According to its findings, the overall impact of the schemes on the club’s financial statements exceeded £900 million.

The punishment has not yet been determined. It will be the subject of a separate process, while Manchester City has already lodged an appeal. It is therefore too early to speak of guaranteed title stripping, relegation from the Premier League or a specific points deduction.

But one thing is already beyond doubt.

The case that now threatens to rewrite the history of England’s most successful team in recent years was largely set in motion by Rui Pinto’s documents.

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A few hours after the Manchester City decision, he learned that he was losing his protection

According to Pinto, on September 30—just a few hours after the decision regarding Manchester City was officially confirmed—the Portuguese commission responsible for the witness-protection programme informed him that his participation in the programme was being terminated.

From October 10, Pinto is set to lose the police protection and secure accommodation he has used since 2020.

Pinto himself describes the situation in far more dramatic terms.

He says he has received multiple death threats and claims there is a serious risk of an assassination attempt against him. As a result, the Portuguese national plans to leave the country and relocate indefinitely to an undisclosed location.

To fund the move and private security, he launched a GoFundMe campaign with a target of three million euros.

“I have no alternative but to relocate,” Pinto explained on the campaign page, linking his decision to the threats and the end of state protection.

At the same time, there is no evidence that the Portuguese authorities’ decision was retaliation specifically for the Manchester City case. It is a coincidence in timing, a point emphasised by Pinto and his defence team.

How a history student became football’s leading hacker

Rui Pedro Gonçalves Pinto was born on October 20, 1988, in Vila Nova de Gaia—a city on the opposite bank of the Douro from Porto.

He was a football fan from childhood and supported Porto. But alongside football, Pinto became increasingly fascinated by computers.

Significantly, he was never a professional programmer.

Pinto acquired most of his technical skills by teaching himself. He enrolled in the history department at the University of Porto and studied in Budapest through the Erasmus programme. He later returned to the Hungarian capital and settled there.

It was from there that he would soon launch one of the biggest information revolutions in modern sport.

Football Leaks: suddenly, football had no doors or locks

Football Leaks appeared online in 2015.

The idea was simple: publish what the football industry wanted to keep behind closed doors.

Contracts, agents’ agreements, correspondence between club executives, offshore companies, real salaries, bonuses, sponsorship arrangements and internal legal documents.

At first, almost nobody knew who was behind it. Pinto operated under the pseudonym John.

One of Football Leaks’ first major stories involved the investment fund Doyen Sports, which was heavily involved in transfers and players’ economic rights.

The issue was that Doyen had effectively gained too much influence over Twente’s transfer policy, even though the club assured football authorities otherwise. Football Leaks documents exposed the hidden terms of the agreement, after which the Dutch federation punished the club—including by banning it from European competitions for three years.

That was when it became clear that Football Leaks was no longer just a strange website filled with other people’s contracts.

The publications began changing football in the real world.

Whistleblower or extortionist?

The image of a selfless digital-age Robin Hood collapses around one crucial episode.

Pinto tried to obtain money from Doyen.

Using a fictitious identity, he entered negotiations over confidential information. The proposed deal involved more than €500,000 in exchange for refraining from publishing certain materials.

Pinto ultimately received no money.

He later acknowledged that the episode had been a mistake. But for the Portuguese prosecution, it was enough to allege an attempted extortion.

In September 2023, Pinto was given a four-year suspended prison sentence for a series of offences, including attempted extortion, unlawful access to data and violation of the secrecy of correspondence.

That is why his story does not fit neatly into the simple formula of “hero versus the system.”

70 million documents that rocked the football world

Pinto established contact with Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Football Leaks materials were later analysed by the international network of journalists European Investigative Collaborations.

The scale was colossal.

It involved tens of millions of emails, contracts, bank documents and other internal information.

The football viewers were used to seeing through goals, trophies and transfers suddenly looked completely different.

Football Leaks revealed the mechanisms through which footballers and their representatives structured income through offshore accounts. It exposed the real terms of contracts. It demonstrated the role of agents and third parties. It showed internal club correspondence.

The documents mentioned Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho, Neymar, PSG, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester City and many others.

And one story went far beyond taxes and football finances.

Ronaldo and the rape case

Perhaps no Football Leaks publication better demonstrates the complexity of Pinto’s legacy than the story of Cristiano Ronaldo and American Kathryn Mayorga.

Mayorga alleged that in 2009 Ronaldo raped her in a Las Vegas hotel room. The footballer categorically denied this and insisted that the sexual encounter had been consensual.

That same day, the woman contacted the police and underwent a medical examination, but did not name the alleged attacker at the time. In 2010, the parties reached a confidential civil settlement: Mayorga received $375,000 and agreed not to disclose the details of the case.

In 2017, Der Spiegel published Football Leaks materials that included internal documents belonging to Ronaldo’s lawyers and correspondence related to the case. The footballer’s representatives claimed that the documents had been stolen by hackers and that some of them may have been altered.

In 2018, Mayorga publicly accused Ronaldo, filed a civil lawsuit and secured the reopening of the criminal investigation. Her lawyer also contacted Rui Pinto directly and obtained Football Leaks documents from him.

In 2019, the Las Vegas prosecution decided not to bring criminal charges against Ronaldo, explaining that the available evidence was insufficient to prove the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.

The civil case lasted longer, but in 2022 the court dismissed it. The reason was that Mayorga’s lawyer had used stolen confidential materials from Ronaldo’s legal team, some of which were protected by legal professional privilege. In 2023, an appeals court upheld the decision.

Thus, Pinto’s documents helped bring an almost forgotten story back to the centre of global attention, but the way they were obtained ultimately became one of the reasons the civil case collapsed.

The Manchester City emails that changed English football

If the Ronaldo story was one of Football Leaks’ most high-profile individual cases, then the Manchester City case became its defining football legacy.

In 2018, Der Spiegel published internal club correspondence that cast doubt on the origin of part of City’s sponsorship revenue.

The principle was simple: if money comes from an independent sponsor, a club can report it as commercial revenue. But if the funds are actually provided by the owner and the sponsor merely acts as an intermediary, that may be a way to circumvent financial rules.

Based on these materials, UEFA launched an investigation and in 2020 banned City from European competitions for two seasons and fined the club €30 million. The Court of Arbitration for Sport later overturned the ban: some charges were deemed unproven, while other incidents could no longer be considered because of the statute of limitations.

The Premier League, however, continued its own investigation. In February 2023, the case was referred to an independent commission, and on September 29, 2026, it announced its decision.

The commission found that Manchester City used sham commercial arrangements: part of the sponsorship payments was effectively covered by entities linked to the club’s owners. According to its findings, the overall impact of these schemes on the financial statements exceeded £900 million.

City denies wrongdoing and is appealing the decision. But Pinto’s documents were the starting point for a case that grew into the most serious financial investigation in Premier League history.

Football Leaks was much bigger than Manchester City

Even the City case does not capture the full scale of Pinto’s activities.

Football Leaks exposed financial structures surrounding the world’s biggest footballers. The materials were used in investigations involving taxes, offshore structures and hidden income.

One of the best-known stories concerned Cristiano Ronaldo’s taxation in Spain. Football Leaks documents helped journalists lay out in detail the structure used to manage his image-rights income.

But Pinto did not stop at football.

He also became the source of Luanda Leaks—an international journalistic investigation into the business empire of Isabel dos Santos, daughter of Angola’s long-serving president José Eduardo dos Santos.

After that, calling Pinto simply a “football hacker” was no longer enough.

Arrest in Budapest and a year behind bars

For Pinto himself, these revelations came at a huge cost.

In January 2019, he was arrested in Budapest under a European arrest warrant.

After being extradited to Portugal, he spent more than a year in custody.

He was charged with unlawful access to computer systems, violating the secrecy of correspondence and attempted extortion.

Pinto insisted that he had acted as a whistleblower and in the public interest. The prosecution responded that the public interest did not automatically grant him the right to break into other people’s computer systems.

That was where the central paradox of his biography took shape.

The Portuguese state prosecuted Pinto for the way he obtained information. Yet at the same time, Pinto’s information was becoming increasingly valuable to state institutions.

In 2020, he agreed to cooperate with investigators and provided access to large encrypted data archives.

After that, he was included in a special witness-protection programme. A criminal in one part of the state apparatus became a valuable informant for another.

241 new charges—and a complete acquittal

Pinto’s legal troubles did not end there.

In the second major Portuguese trial, he faced 241 charges, mostly related to unlawful access to the email accounts of Benfica, sports organisations, law firms, members of the judiciary and tax authorities.

But in April 2026, the case took a sensational turn. Pinto was acquitted on all 241 counts.

The court concluded that the prosecution was procedurally invalid and that Pinto had effectively been tried twice for the same factual circumstances.

The prosecution has appealed.

As of today, his legal status is as contradictory as his reputation. He has been convicted of a number of cybercrimes and attempted extortion. At the same time, he was acquitted of hundreds of other charges. He obtained private documents unlawfully. And he also provided materials that became the foundation for hugely important journalistic and official investigations.

Hacker or whistleblower?

Perhaps the most accurate answer is: both.

It is difficult to call Pinto a classic whistleblower in the traditional sense.

He was not a Manchester City accountant who one day discovered a secret scheme and decided to pass it on to journalists.

He actively searched for information, broke into systems, obtained other people’s emails and downloaded documents.

In the Doyen case, he even tried to obtain money in exchange for his silence.

There is no way to romanticise this part of the story. But it is equally impossible to deny the consequences of his work.

Without Football Leaks, the world might never have seen millions of documents detailing football’s internal economy, and a number of tax and financial investigations might never have begun. Without him, the story of Kathryn Mayorga and Cristiano Ronaldo might have remained buried beneath a confidentiality agreement. And without him, the Premier League might never have obtained the initial material that prompted it to examine Manchester City’s finances.

Did he really bring down the Manchester City empire?

Not yet.

City has appealed. The sanctions have not yet been determined. New hearings and months or years of legal battles may lie ahead.

But Pinto has already done something that seemed almost impossible ten years ago.

The documents of an unknown Portuguese man operating under the pseudonym John travelled from an anonymous website on the internet to Der Spiegel, from journalistic investigations to UEFA offices, and from there to the Premier League’s independent commission.

Pinto himself, meanwhile, has found himself in a situation that perfectly sums up his entire career.

The man who forced the football industry to explain where hundreds of millions came from is now asking strangers for money on GoFundMe.

The man whose files were used by law-enforcement agencies in several countries is preparing to leave his own country out of fear for his life.

The man who was tried as a cybercriminal became the source of information capable of changing the history of the Premier League.

Rui Pinto did not become an unambiguous hero, but he certainly became the man after whom football could no longer hide its secrets so easily.