A Game of Secrets

In the fall of 2015 an obscure website appears out of nowhere and starts revealing shady deals and systematic fraud in the football industry. Welcome to Football Leaks. This project aims to show the hidden side of football, reads their manifesto. Cristiano Ronaldo and the FIFA president become targets of criminal investigations, and Manchester City is expelled from the Champions League, all because of Football Leaks. A top agent, apparently in business with oligarchs, is blackmailed by a Russian hacker to make the massive leak of confidential documents stop. After a high-stakes meeting at a gas station outside of Lisbon, former MI5 agents working for the agent close in on the hacker. Police finally raid a scrappy Budapest apartment and find a teenage-looking computer nerd with a bunch of hard drives. The world watches in astonishment as 30-year-old Rui Pinto, an outsider with little formal education, is identified as having shaken the global football business. The trial against Pinto turns into a credibility contest between two parties accused, among other things, of hosting a sex party on a private island to sell a player, and of committing digital bank robbery in the Caribbean. In the end it’s all testament to a professional football economy run amok.