Making enemies: What is the motivation behind Football Leaks?

A man named only as 'John' has emerged as the public voice for Football Leaks, doing interviews with traditional media as the rogue website continues to publish information that threatens to expose big clubs, agents and players in world football.

His case for it is simple: transparency.

Little else is known about the people behind the vigilante network. They claim to fight for more credibility in football, but they themselves have none of it.

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They've been called criminals. They're being investigated by Portuguese authorities for breaking international banking laws, and they're being painted as blackmail artists looking for large sums of money in exchange for total silence.

Doyen Sports - the dubious investment group that Football Leaks contends has made more than €70 million over the past five years on transfers - made the latter accusations. An email obtained by the Daily Mirror reveals that a person acting on behalf of the site requested a "donation" between €500,000 and €1 million to cease publication.

That, apparently, hasn't happened.

A proponent and facilitator of third-party ownership (TPO), Doyen has stood the biggest beating as a result of the leaks. FIFA banned the practice of TPO in 2015, and Football Leaks has further exposed Doyen's dealings, including dubious economic agreements with Dutch and Portuguese clubs that favour its private investors.

But for all the skepticism, there is value in Football Leaks. FIFA's own transfer guru, Mark Goddard, who oversees the governing body's Transfer Matching System, has admitted that the site is a "useful" resource. His only wish is that a more official database existed.

"It would be really good if we could have a verifiable, transparent, credible source as opposed to back pages of football magazines and soccer leak websites and these kind of things," Goddard told Bloomberg.

FIFA does track data on transfer fees and salaries, but it still reeks of secrecy and corruption. Transparency International criticised the majority of FIFA members in November for failing to make their financial reports public, and even with the presidential election set for Feb. 26, the prospect of reform seems far away.

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The information published by Football Leaks has already exposed some of the sport's darkest corners, proving its role in the industry is an important one. Eredivisie side FC Twente received a three-year ban from European competition in December after the leaks revealed a deal had taken place between the Dutch club and Doyen over the divvying up of transfer fee rights.

Former Germany defender Christoph Metzelder also sees the positives of the site, which "shed light on the wildest clauses and show the arbitrariness and modern trafficking in football today," he wrote in a column.

That much is true. Football Leaks published Gareth Bale's 2013 transfer agreement between Tottenham and Real Madrid, and in it was explosive fine print that could yield an investigation from the European Union. Members of European Parliament from Britain, Belgium, and Spain have since argued that Madrid used illegal state aid to subsidise that world-record transfer, indirectly refinancing part of the EU's €41-billion bailout package.

And the trafficking of players, as Metzelder calls it, is a major sticking point for FIFPro, a footballers' union representing the interests of tens of thousands of players across the globe. The organisation has fought to eliminate the transfer system in its current state, in which it claims players "are sold like commodities."

If Football Leaks can prompt even the slightest bit of change, then the game is better for it.