It’s a tragedy the Premier League need a hacker convicted of blackmail to hold Man City to account

Almost everyone is taking satisfaction from Manchester City finally having to answer to those 115 Premier League charges.

There were thumbs up outside London’s International Dispute Resolution Centre last week from the senior clerk of the Blackstone legal chambers whose vastly remunerated KC, Lord Pannick, is leading the club’s case. And yes, Pep Guardiola is right — many clubs are salivating at the thought of City losing. Printed, in black and white, in the 93-page report of City’s last legal hearing, is the list of nine clubs who lodged demands that the club be allowed no stay of execution if convicted: Arsenal, Burnley, Chelsea, Leicester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle, Tottenham and Wolves.

Consider the individual whose evidence is at the core of the Premier League’s case, though, and it is hard to share in all this schadenfreude, because he is a contradictory and by no means convincing authority. Rui Pinto — the computer geek who hacked the emails which have left City facing allegations that they received at least £200million of Abu Dhabi money disguised as sponsorship income — presents himself and his work as selfless service to the transparency of football.

When he first communicated with the outside world about the hacked documents which had revealed football’s dirty little secrets — Cristiano Ronaldo’s tax avoidance, the late Mino Raiola’s £41m cut of Paul Pogba’s move back to Manchester United — he certainly did seem to fit the Robin Hood profile. When I first wrote about him, in 2018, he was living in seedy flats in Hungary, consuming little more than lemonade and chocolate cake and was known as simply ‘John’ — a common nom de plume of anonymous whistleblowers.

He was not averse to the occasional all-nighter at underground nightclubs, dancing until 5am on one occasion on a night he began by watching Real Madrid v Roma in a Budapest bar. He said he was on the move every three days for fear of detection by those he had exposed. Hungarian police told us that he was hanging out in internet cafes and libraries, using public internet servers to hack incognito.

The hearing into Man City’s 115 charges for alleged breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules began last week and many clubs are salivating over the prospect of City losing

Lord Pannick KC (right) is leading City’s case and he has gained much traction for his role

Rui Pinto is the computer geek who hacked the emails which have left City facing allegations that they received at least £200million of Abu Dhabi money disguised as sponsorship income

But when his identity came out into the light and he was investigated, a different side to this story emerged. One of the companies whose documents his Football Leaks website had hacked was Doyen Sports, agents to David Beckham, whose own excruciating emails castigating the British honours committee as a ‘bunch of c***’ for not knighting him, were duly made public.

Doyen’s chief executive received an email with demands for money in return for no further compromising correspondence being published and a meeting allegedly took place at a motorway service station outside Lisbon in Pinto’s native Portugal. Last September, Pinto was convicted — among other crimes — of attempting to extort between £500,000 and £1m from Doyen and given a suspended four-year prison sentence. He would never have gone through with his extortion threats, his lawyer insisted.

Since he only ever communicates through his lawyer, there has never been the chance to ask Pinto about the extortion. Nor about the fact that Yandex, Russia’s biggest internet firm, stepped in to provide a server for Football Leaks when it seemed that its account would be closed down. All Yandex traffic is monitored by Russia’s FSB, formerly the KGB, and it was through a Yandex account that the email extorting Doyen cash was sent. Could a hacker helped by the Russians really be enough to upend British football? Quite possibly, yes.

City have never recognised their six hacked emails and single attachment, published on Football Leaks by Pinto. At the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), where they successfully appealed against a two-year UEFA Champions League ban in 2020, the club described the emails as ‘the criminally obtained documents’ and insisted they should be deemed inadmissible.

But it is inconceivable that those documents — among a cache of an astonishing 5,500,000 that City told CAS had been stolen from them — will not be central to the Premier League case. CAS ruled that the public interest in holding Manchester City to account outweighed the risk of hacking being legitimised by the use of such evidence. City produced original versions of the emails as part of their own defence, so have effectively legitimised them anyway.

City boss Pep Guardiola is right that many clubs are excited at the thought of City losing

Pinto, who is from Portugal, only communicates through his lawyer William Bourdon (right)

But the fact it should have taken an individual such as Pinto to hold the outstanding British club of this era to account should bring no satisfaction, rather this case is a tragedy for football

It’s hard to feel overwhelming sympathy with City. Two key witnesses who, given the club’s absolute insistence of innocence, could have offered full and frank explanations of the leaked emails’ contents, simply didn’t materialise before a UEFA investigative committee testing City’s culpability on similar charges to those it faces now. No reason was given for their absence.

Yet when it came to appealing against the UEFA ban, at CAS, the same two men — City director and communication guru Simon Pearce and the club’s finance head Andrew Widdowson — duly materialised on video conference calls and spoke at length. UEFA were astonished to find ‘an entirely new case’ presented by City when the appeal began.

City’s attempts to delay and stymie this case also know no limits and they certainly won’t be short of legal muscle over the next 10 weeks in central London. They had 10 lawyers to UEFA’s three at the CAS hearing. But that it should have taken an individual such as Pinto to hold the outstanding British club of this era to account should bring no satisfaction. Whatever the outcome, when a verdict materialises next spring, the case is a tragedy for our football.

Please Sky, let football do the talking? 

A beautiful Match of the Day segment surfaced on Twitter this week, in which the incomparable Barry Davies introduces a selection of goals to mark the show’s 25th anniversary in 1989. 

‘Some matchless moments from the stars of the show — the players,’ Davies relates, in that unassuming style of his, teeing up a montage capturing Best, Keegan, Brady, Hoddle, Fashanu and many others. 

Are the players still the ‘stars of the show’ for TV? I’m not so sure. There were no fewer than six pundits working the City v Arsenal game for Sky on Sunday — Roy Keane, Theo Walcott, Paul Merson, fresh from the Strictly studio and Micah Richards, with Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher on commentary. 

Sky do things so very well but I won’t be the only one who yearns for a little of those days of Davies, John Motson and Jimmy Hill.

It feels increasingly when watching football on TV that the players are no longer the stars

Fans must call out sickening chants 

It’s already started at Fulham. The taunting chants of ‘Al Fayed was a rapist’ — emanating from the Newcastle United end when their club played at Craven Cottage on Saturday, even while the testimonies of those women subjected to the former Fulham owner’s alleged predatory behaviour, rape and sexual assault, are still emerging. 

Where were the fathers, brother and uncles and sons in that away contingent? Men big enough to tell individuals disseminating such mockery that they are filth — scum — and have no place among any travelling support base.

County Championship still beats the rest 

The last rays of a wonderful sporting summer arrived at the very last, for me. Two days in the sunshine at Old Trafford last week, watching Lancashire beat Somerset to maintain hope of staving off relegation. 

Lancashire’s Rocky Flintoff up against Somerset’s Archie Vaughan, perhaps for the first time since their respective Manchester schools faced other. 

I spent a glorious two days watching Lancashire beat Somerset at Old Trafford last week

Vaughan’s maiden senior half-century. Every allotted over bowled. An edge to every session. The last day’s use of a 10-day Lancashire flexi-membership which has been a joy, despite Red Rose struggles. 

County championship cricket, soaring above England, Australia and another meaningless, gravy train ODI.