The judge’s allegiance to Benfica, the biggest soccer club in Portugal, hardly made him an outlier.

Benfica often boasts that it can count more than half of Portugal’s population as supporters, and judges, prosecutors, top police officials and even the country’s prime minister are regular guests in the directors’ box at the team’s matches. One judge has been so loyal, in fact, that he was honored last year with a Golden Eagle lapel pin, symbolic of his half-century affiliation with the club.

So when it was revealed that a judge, not the one given the lapel pin but another one, had joined the legion of critics assailing a 31-year-old computer hacker, Rui Pinto, who had embarrassed Benfica by publishing some of its darkest secrets online, few rushed to his defense.

But to lawyers for Pinto, who is scheduled to stand trial this summer, the judge’s fandom was a serious problem: He had been assigned to oversee their client’s case.