Rui Pinto set up Football Leaks in 2015, published confidential club documents and helped push Manchester City's financial case into the open. BBC Sport says it spoke to journalists, a former financial adviser at Manchester City and Pinto himself across Europe for the feature, which traces how tens of millions of documents started moving through football's quieter corners.
Football Leaks and the documents behind it
The material was not just broad in volume, it was specific in content. Pinto published a cache of confidential club documents, including internal emails about sponsorship deals and payments, and that is what gave the leak operation its edge. Christoph Winterbach of Der Spiegel described the feeling of seeing the files as "like a child in a candy store", then added that the emails offered "a real look behind the curtain, how things work."
Antonio Varela of Record recalled the first contact in September 2015: "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." Record quickly concluded the site was carrying information it had never seen before.
Manchester City's case and the sanctions backdrop
The fallout now sits around one of the biggest financial cases in the modern game. BBC Sport says Manchester City were found guilty of the majority of the 115 counts, and Sports Mole says the club were initially charged with 115 alleged breaches between 2009 and 2018. Sports Mole also reported that a points deduction would be open to the disciplinary commission, but no punishment had yet been decided.
The scale of the possible punishment has inevitably pulled in old reference points. Luton were docked 10 points by the FA and a further 20-point sanction by the EFL in 2008-09, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were each docked 30 points for the 2005-06 season, and Derby County were hit by a 21-point deduction in 2021-22 after administration and accounting-rule breaches. Those are the kinds of numbers that frame any discussion of City now.
The evidence in this story is less about one club's misstep than about how one leak operation changed the reach of football journalism. Football Leaks began in 2015, the documents were shared publicly, and the Manchester City case that followed is still being measured against some of the harshest sanctions the sport has seen.
Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 2 outlets. How we work →
