Hero or Zero?

In a perfectly regular environment, the season had just started and everything looked the same old way, calm and discreet. We were in 2015, during transfer season of European football when a scandal bursts the World of the King of Sports.

The Football Leaks came up. Out of nowhere, an unsigned website shocks the world with millions of documents revealing corruption scandals in football. No one knew who published them or where the documents came from but the truth had came up, and no one could avoid that.

The football clubs were speechless whilst the papers sought answers. The whistleblower decided to stop publishing the documents in the website to start publishing it in collaboration with two journalists from Der Spiegel. Rafael Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger leaned over the published documents and managed to share the informations with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), a group of consecrated papers in Europe interested in investigative journalism.

The data was out there and the most difficult thing to do was to gather the outrageous information: Original contracts, secret clauses, confidential emails and whatsapp conversations revealed some of the dirtiest business in football, involving superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Mesut Ozil and Paul Pogba.

Self-proclaimed “John” was by that time the person behind this leak and he was constantly giving new material to Der Spiegel, compromising the biggest clubs, agents and players from the European panorama. He didn’t reveal much of him, he knew that what he did was illegal and was messing with a powerful industry.

The leaked information was deleted from the original website for unknown reasons but the two journalists gathered the data and published in 2018 the “Football Leaks”, a three hundred pages book, describing each scandal, chapter by chapter. The consequences for the industry started to show up, charges for tax evasion were made against big names like Cristiano Ronaldo, Benfica, Ozil and José Mourinho for instance.

Yet from more than 18 million documents not much was done. Most of the charges were unblemished and the main point of the whole story went straight to the whistleblower. For most of the papers, the most concerning part of the leak was not the information itself anymore, but the person who had revealed it. Also, he messed with one of the most influential institution in Portugal, Benfica. He was discovered by the Portuguese Judiciary Police, and one month before he went to France to work with the French police the Portuguese whistleblower Rui Pinto was arrested in Budapest and brought back to Portugal.

He is now nicknamed “Benfica Hacker” and most of the Portuguese population has no idea about what the Football Leaks are. The press made him look like an absolute criminal while he has not been judged yet. Currently he is accused of attempted extortion and alleged intrusion of private data.  He is in probation since January 2019.

Despite his availability for collaboration with the Portuguese Police the authorities have not contacted him yet and in a recent interview he claims to be a political prisoner of system.

Whistleblower or Hacker?

As much as Edward Snowden is a polemical case in the security issues in the US so is Rui Pinto in the European football industry.

It is true that what they did is not legal. It is true that the documents they reveal brought up the truth. So, what should they be called?

Whistleblower

Rui Pinto can be seen as a person who sacrificed his own liberty for a greater good. Someone who felt that was in such a privileged position due to his informatic skills that he had to tell the world what is happening in the backstage of the “Beautiful Game”. The Portuguese denounced the way the TPO’s (Third-party ownership) are ruining some young player’s careers and bankrupting several clubs. He did what he had to do and reported the parasites that pester football, that are not much more than companies that buy players and foist them with complex contracts.

When Der Spiegel asked him in a recent interview: “Did you ever imagine that Football Leaks could end in a Lisbon prison for you?” he answered: “I was aware that anything could happen. I knew that Portuguese authorities prosecute whistleblowers, so I had to be ready for that.”

Hacker

In the other hand, Rui Pinto can be seen as a hacker that stole confidential data and release it for the major public. Of course, we could not assume that we are dealing with pure evil. But he is accused of extorsion which means that he is accused of trying to make money out of his documents. According to the Portuguese authorities, Rui Pinto tried to blackmail Doyen Sports (one TPO agency) by asking them money to keep their information hidden from public. Concerning that accusation the Portuguese claimed that he only wanted to know if they accept it to check if the information was true and he would not accept the money: The authorities say that it was attempted extortion and they are using that to keep me in jail. In my opinion, I didn’t commit a crime. I approached them to test the value of the information I gathered. I never intended to take their money”. Apart from that, he is now accused of 147 crimes most of them repeatedly for hacking and breaking secrecy of correspondence.

After all we are just the bystanders and we do not know nothing for sure. All we can do is sit and watch, be informed and fight for what we believe in. And what do you think?

Rui Pinto: Hero or zero?