Almeida signed for Beşiktaş during the “Portuguese wave”, when Demiroren transferred seven Mendes players and one coach to Beşiktaş in a one-year period between the summers of 2010 and 2011.

Beşiktaş was generous with the contracts for these Portuguese, but especially so with Almeida, shelling out a €2.5 million salary, as well as a host of luxurious extras, like a brand-new Porsche, private jet leases, €11,000 a month for an apartment, business-class flights, and a second car of his choosing. Mendes was paid handsomely too, receiving a €1.5 million fee.

The club might have felt there was money to spare; they had not contributed to any of the €2 million transfer fee paid to German club Werder Bremen. Instead, Demirören did a deal where Beşiktaş would buy Almeida outright for €2 million, but then a third party investment fund called Quality Football Ireland Limited would purchase 45 percent of Almeida’s ‘economic rights’ from Beşiktaş for the same amount. This practice, known as Third Party Ownership, or TPO, meant the QFIL was entitled to 45 percent of any future transfer fee - if Beşiktaş sold the player.

When the deal was concluded, Demirören proudly boasted that, “[with this fund] we opened a very important door for Beşiktaş and Turkish football. Bringing a player for free is like selling him for profit.”

In mid-2010, not long before the Almeida deal was concluded, former Man United and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon and the football agent Jorge Mendes set up Quality Sports Investment (QSI). This company's investor presentation shows that QSI was half owned by Jorge Mendes’s Gestifute with the other half owned by CAA Sports International, a leading sports agency. Mendes and Kenyon were also advisors to the QSI.

QSI is a key part of an offshore investment structure that collects money from groups of investors and gives it to QSI. QSI then loans the money back to Quality Football Ireland Limited and other vehicle companies to purchase players’ economic rights. This way, each LP owns varying degree of several players.

Kenyon and QSI were intimately involved in drafting and approving the Economic Rights Participation Agreement (ERPA), signed with Beşiktaş on 23 December 2010, that granted it 45 percent of Almeida’s economic rights.

The shared ownership was confirmed by Demirören during his TV appearance, where he claimed that Beşiktaş owned “all of the player, [but] if the player is sold, 55 percent of the transfer fee is going to our club.”

But Demirören’s left out a lot of key information. Football Leaks documents detail how the Beşiktaş president failed to disclose that he had signed a proxy ERPA agreement worth ten percent of Almeida’s future transfer fee with Mendes’s Irish firm, Gestifute.

“Gestifute are getting 1.5mn EUR for the player signing for Beşiktaş and 10% sell on fee,” writes Karish Andrews, a sports lawyer working for Mendes. “This is a sell on fee rather than pure economic rights but we now understand why Beşiktaş marked up our contract as such. As long as Beşiktaş pay the 10% from their share I can’t imagine PK [Peter Kenyon] will have a problem with this and Beşiktaş should represent that they hold 100% of the economic rights - they have just contracted to pay Gestifute a 10% sell on fee.”

The words are different, but the effect is the same. Not only was Mendes paid for agent services through improper intermediary contracts, and his QSI fund deeply involved in Almeida’s economic rights, he also owned ten percent of Almeida, raising serious questions about conflicts of interests, none of which were properly disclosed.

When Beşiktaş made an offer, in 2011, to buy QFIL’s 45 percent interest in Almeida for €6 million – three times what the fund had paid for them – it was also sent to Kenyon and QSI (the deal never materialised).

Demirören, for his part, failed to divulge much of this, as well as what would happen if Beşiktaş did not sell Almeida before his employment contract concluded at the end of May 2014. As this day approached, it was clear the player was not destined to stay at the club, as discussions reveal he was complaining about Beşiktaş’s failure to pay his wages on time, and was keen to move to another club – another football agent told one European club, according to Football Leaks documents.

Beşiktaş would soon come to understand that there is no such thing as free player.