Pinto created Football Leaks in 2015 with the stated aim of revealing what he called football’s concealed inner workings.
Antonio Varela still recalls the website’s debut clearly. The Portuguese reporter was the first journalist approached by Pinto, whose true identity remained secret for several years and who initially used the alias “John”.
Varela said that an unexpected email from Football Leaks arrived while he was working in Record’s newsroom in September 2015. After opening the website, he was astonished by the volume of previously unseen information and quickly recognised its potential importance.
Publishing the material disclosed by Pinto raised difficult legal and ethical questions.
Varela explained that although the information appeared to have been obtained unlawfully, it entered the public domain once it was posted on the website.
He acknowledged the ethical complexity but said the journalists ultimately decided that the public interest carried greater weight.
Manchester City, eight-time winners of the Premier League, were far from Pinto’s only subject.
Football Leaks initially concentrated on Portuguese football, publishing material involving Benfica as well as FC Porto, the club Pinto supported.
Documents and messages connected to some of football’s best-known players, clubs and representatives later emerged, including material involving Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar.
Pinto eventually met Rafael Buschmann, a journalist from the German magazine Der Spiegel. After becoming confident that Buschmann could be trusted, Pinto gave him access to tens of millions of files.
A group of reporters at Der Spiegel’s Hamburg headquarters then carefully examined the material, leading to a series of major investigations that shook the football world.
Data journalist Christoph Winterbach was among those who worked on the documents.
He described the initial experience as exciting and overwhelming, comparing it to a child entering a sweet shop.
For a football follower or sports reporter, Winterbach said, seeing original documents and private emails offered a rare opportunity to understand how negotiations took place behind closed doors.
He stressed that such a large collection of documents and data required extensive cross-checking. The team also used specialist software to organise the files, establish context and identify possible reliability concerns.
Before publishing any findings, the journalists sought to confirm that the material was genuine and that reporting it served the public interest.
Winterbach first met Pinto face to face in 2019, while Pinto was detained in Lisbon awaiting trial. He later interviewed him again at a heavily guarded, undisclosed witness-protection location, saying the elaborate journey there felt like something from a Hollywood film.
Winterbach portrayed Pinto as a relatively short man with recognisable spiky hair and frequently flushed cheeks. He said Pinto appeared youthful, mischievous and humorous, while also coming across as friendly and welcoming.
He also characterised Pinto as highly intelligent, disciplined and intensely focused, with strong ideals concerning the subjects exposed through his disclosures.
In Winterbach’s assessment, Pinto ranks among the most significant whistleblowers in Europe and perhaps worldwide.
Altogether, Pinto supplied more than three terabytes of information to Der Spiegel and other members of the European Investigative Collaborations network, an amount comparable to roughly 3,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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