The good fight: Debating the ethics of Football Leaks

When Football Leaks began its assault on the sport in September 2015, it first outed a club close to home. Confirmed as Portuguese citizens, the people behind the controversial website exposed capital club Sporting Lisbon for its dealings with a mysterious investor from Angola. Those revelations forced the club's president, Bruno de Carvalho, to report Football Leaks to the country's authorities. Carvalho even suspected that these vigilantes were in fact informants working for city rival Benfica.

The website's scope has widened since then. And the stream is steady: There's new material posted virtually every day, ranging from endorsements contracts to transfer agreements and legal papers, and there seems to be no end in sight.

"We will publish every single document," a source told Matt Hughes of The Times in late January.

How Football Leaks has built an archive worth at least 300 gigabytes of confidential data in just a few months is open to interpretation. The suspicion about the rogue organisation is that it's run by hackers.

But the main spokesman for the controversial website, known only as "John," maintains Football Leaks is not only comprised of "regular computer users" but that they are doing it for free. They have even set up a Bitcoin account asking for donations.

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One of their biggest targets is Doyen Sports, the private investment group with ties to Brazilian star Neymar, super agent Jorge Mendes, and several other Portuguese clubs. Doyen believes it fell victim to a hack from the people working for Football Leaks, while claiming they tried to blackmail the company in exchange for immunity. Along with police, Doyen has reportedly called upon private detectives to figure out how and where the site is getting information.

Firebrands like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange were forced to live on the run for similar reasons. It's easy to see the parallel here: The name of the site is even a nod to Assange's WikiLeaks.

"They sacrificed everything for their convictions and dreams," John wrote in an email to German news magazine Der Spiegel. "People like Snowden and Assange are a big inspiration for us."

Football Leaks has been shut down several times, its server now based in Russia "because it's publicly known Russian authorities rarely cooperate with Western authorities," John said in a separate interview with the New York Times. This is fast becoming a manhunt.

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And that's to be expected. The vigilante network is, after all, taking on clubs and executives that trade billions of dollars every year.

"The football lobby has very powerful people working for it. They also have significant influence over the investigative authorities," the man told Der Spiegel.

None of the clubs affected have directly refuted the authenticity of any of the documents exposed: not Manchester United, not Real Madrid, not Sporting. Madrid in particular has suffered greatly from the exposure: The deals for Gareth Bale, James Rodriguez, Xabi Alonso, Mesut Ozil, and Toni Kroos are among the most conspicuous leaks.

After conducting its own internal investigation, Madrid reached the conclusion that there is no mole inside the club, according to Spanish newspaper El Confidential. That would all but rule out employees, agents, and intermediaries as potential sources of the leaks, and increase the likelihood of a cyberattack.

The Times also believes that at least some of the papers are forgeries, leading to the assumption that there's an agenda at play.

The common refrain from Football Leaks, however, is that it's pursuing "transparency in the sport we all love," it told the British paper, independent of any higher powers looking to gain leverage.

At the very least, it has opened a referendum on the way in which the football industry works. Its anonymous servants don't inspire much trust, but they have in a way already made a name for themselves.