Last week, news exploded like a bomb inside the dressing room of Manchester City, champions of the Premier League, the English football tournament, the richest and most competitive national club competition in the world. For the next two seasons, that is, until July 2022, the team led by Spanish coach Pep Guardiola is banned from all European competitions. In addition to serving the sporting punishment, City will have to pay a fine of 30 million euros to UEFA, the governing body of sport on the continent.
According to the indictment, Manchester’s blue and white team violated the federation’s rules by not respecting what is conventionally called “financial fair play”, a code of conduct created in 2010 to contain much imbalance between the most powerful and the most powerful. weaker, and also to avoid, with careful monitoring, the bankruptcy of football teams. In general terms, according to the norm, no association can spend more than it collects. However, the big billionaire patrons are wildly breaking the rules by pouring money into clubs, hidden through accounting tricks, if not through tax fraud schemes.
Everything was going more or less well, in a hypocritical way, until Rui Pinto, a young Portuguese man of just 31 years old, a history student at the University of Porto, who loves football and computers, appeared on the scene as a hacker – in the style of of other renowned figures of their ilk, such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the figures behind the great leaks of our time. Rui got his hands on more than 70 million exchanges of messages and documents that, according to him, expose “everything that serves to enrich certain parasites who take advantage of football”.
Journalistic investigations using this material have already exposed numerous deals and swindles involving teams and big names in the sport, such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi (see the box below). As is always the case with complaints that spring from the digital invasion, the punishments – as now, in the case of Manchester City – go hand in hand with much excitement. Opinions are divided between those who consider the posture a crime and those who see it as a lesser evil to solve a greater problem.
Rui Pinto has been in prison in Lisbon since March 22 of last year. He is accused of at least ninety crimes, such as illegitimate access to confidential information, violation of correspondence, computer sabotage and attempted extortion – before revealing his findings for free to the press, the Portuguese would have tried to extract money from parties involved in the scandal. He denies the charges. “I don’t consider myself a hacker, but a citizen who acted in the name of the public interest,” he said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “My only intention was to reveal illegal practices that affect the world of football.” The quarrel is great, because the cartology walks atavistically on the upper floors of politics. One of the Portuguese lawyers is Frenchman William Bourdon, who also defended Snowden and Assange. “We believe in the purity of his motivation. He has no interest in money,” says Bourdon. It is difficult to say that Rui Pinto is a pure man, a defender of good practices. But it is certain, however, that after him the billionaire European football will never be the same.
Published in VEJA on February 26, 2020, issue no. 2675
