Etihad Stadium leak: Football Leaks

The Etihad Stadium leak that eventually fed into 115 Premier League charges against Manchester City did not start with a boardroom mole or a disgruntled executive. It started with an anonymous email, sent in September 2015, signed only "John".

Nobody receiving it knew they were reading the first message from Football Leaks. How Football Leaks targeted the Etihad Stadium internal files Football Leaks .

The material sat behind closed doors for years before it surfaced online, and City have always disputed how it was obtained and used. Those documents did not stay a footnote.

They fed directly into the case that produced Premier League financial charges against City and, ultimately, a guilty ruling on the majority of the 115 counts the club faced. Our Premier League charges process explained covers how that case moved from allegation to verdict.

It is worth stating plainly: Football Leaks obtained this data illegally. Journalists who later handled it were open about that fact, even as they argued the public interest justified publishing what they found.

Behind the pseudonym: Rui Pinto and the Football Leaks archive The man behind "John" was Rui Pinto, now 37, a Portuguese computer hacker who grew up in Vila Nova de Gaia and attended Escola Secundaria Almeida Garrett. Long before his name became attached to one of football's biggest data breaches, he was simply a pupil there.

His former teacher, Mario Falcao, remembers him as unremarkable in the best sense. "Rui was a perfectly normal pupil.

He was nice, with his spiky hair, he was quite sociable but not extrovert," Falcao said. Attendance was not always his strong point, but it never held him back.

"He had a good relationship with the teachers, although he did miss these classes quite often. His father was always on top of things, so in the end he passed quite easily.