The biggest data leak in the history of sport and what it reveals about big money in international football
The fact that the world of football is less and less about sport and increasingly about dirty dealings is something football fans have been suspecting long before the FIFA scandals. But Football Leaks sheds light for the first time on the shadowy world of this industry and the whole spectrum of the greed holding sway behind the scenes of international football.
Whistleblower “John” has handed over 1.9 terabytes of secret data to the weekly Spiegel, amounting to 18.6 million documents on negotiations, contracts and agreements – documents that reveal that for stakeholders in international football, be they clubs, players or agents, morals and laws do not count.
For Football Leaks, Rafael Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger spent months doing research and now reveal the highly explosive material they have extracted from the data, including the secret player contracts of Mesut Özil, Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo, and the take-it-or-leave-it contracts of players’ agents. Their book is at the same time a gripping story of a whistleblower who wants to liberate football from its Mafia structures – and is now himself being hunted.