Meet Rui Pinto, the man who exposed Man City’s Financial Fairplay violations
Pinto has brought the strongest footballing empire in the world to its knees. (AP)
6 min readSep 28, 2026 10:12 PM IST First published on: Sep 28, 2026 at 10:07 PM IST
On the banks of River Vltava in Budapest, Rui Pinto was having a few pints with his friends and talking about football when an idea struck him: to launch a website that exposes the murky side of the Beautiful Game.
Pinto, then a history undergraduate assisting his father in their antique shop, had little formal IT training. But his world was all computers from childhood, and he was, self-admittedly, “a self-taught IT genius.” He and his friends, football-obsessed hackers with varying degrees of expertise, knew sordid information about clubs and footballing superstars through illegitimate access. They decided to expose them to the world.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.