Football Leaks, friend or foe of the beautiful game?

Posted Saturday, February 13, 2016 by Marca.com

Football Leaks is a website that copies the structure of WikiLeaks, the website created by Julian Assange in 2010 in order to blow the whistle on political scandals and irregular behaviour throughout the world.

There are no names or addresses anywhere to be seen on Football Leaks should you wish to contact them. That is how it has been since its inception in late September 2015, making investigations into the people behind the project, who are believed to be Portuguese, rather tricky.

MARCA got in touch with them via email: "For the time being we can't reveal any information about our internal matters", read the abrupt reply.

Football Leaks took to the internet as "an organisation created in search of the truth", convinced that "only by public pressure can you make a difference and uncover the hidden side of football".

Portuguese coach Jorge Jesus's controversial contract with Sporting triggered a series of revelations involving Gareth Bale, Neymar, Mesut Ozil, Anthony Martial, Radamel Falcao... The list is almost endless and this is seemingly only the beginning, because the heads of the website claim not to know "the exact number of documents, but we have over 300 gigabytes of information. Not one piece is false. Nobody will be able to silence us".

These leaks have earned the perpetrators some powerful enemies, such as Doyen Sports, an organisation belonging to worldwide conglomerate Doyen Group that was created in 2008 with the aim of financing the purchase and sale of certain players' rights to make money in subsequent deals.

Football Leaks' activity is being investigated by the Portuguese authorities, after Doyen Sports reported them for extortion and accused the website of stealing and publishing confidential documents that had been manipulated and falsified.

That is Doyen's version of events, while Football Leaks responded on MARCA with a similar accusation: "We received some very strange emails in early December. Somebody wanted to buy all our documents and offered us around 650,000 euros for them. They also suggested a type of collaboration on future projects. Everything seemed very odd and, of course, we rejected the proposal".