On September 13th last year, two weeks before Mayorga’s interview appeared, Sábado, a Portuguese magazine, named Pinto as the source behind Football Leaks and the prime suspect in the release of the Benfica e-mails. Pinto’s face was on the cover. The Portuguese media harried him, and his Facebook page rapidly filled with threats from Benfica fans. Pinto had worried about being publicly identified, and about how best to defend himself, for some time. In 2017, prosecutors from France’s Parquet National Financier, an anti-corruption unit, had made contact with Football Leaks, inviting John to share his data. (France has some of the strongest whistle-blowing protections in Europe.) The following summer, Pinto approached William Bourdon, who specializes in whistle-blower cases, and asked him to broker a meeting.

In late November, Pinto travelled to Paris to meet with the P.N.F. “I spoke as a witness,” he recalled. “Basically said what kind of data I have, how I got the data, and that is all.” Pinto told me that he also met with officers from France’s witness-protection program, who gave him a secure phone with which to contact them in case of an emergency. “They considered that my situation was quite alarming,” he said. After he returned to Budapest, Pinto resolved to move to France in February. “All this situation was a bit stressful,” he told me. Pinto confided in Buschmann. “He said often to me, ‘I will have a family, I will have kids,’ ” Buschmann said. “ ‘I will have a normal life.’ ”

In the middle of January, 2019, Pinto’s father and his stepmother, Elizabeth, visited him. “They suspected that something was going on,” Pinto said. When they arrived at Pinto’s apartment, on a quiet, residential street in Budapest’s seventh district, they couldn’t open their luggage. Their suitcases had combination locks, which seemed to have been tampered with. The following evening, Pinto and his father went to the supermarket. When they returned to Pinto’s street, there were police cars and men in uniform. “I realized, O.K., they are coming for me,” he said. Upstairs, the police seized Pinto’s laptop, three cell phones—including the one belonging to the French authorities—three USB sticks, and fourteen hard drives, containing twenty-nine terabytes of data. Pinto was taken to a detention center, where he asked to call his lawyer. The police said no. “They said, ‘This is not an American movie,’ ” Pinto recalled.

Pinto was released under house arrest. When I visited him, in late February, he wore a Levi’s T-shirt, jeans, and an electronic tag on his left ankle. His parents had stayed in Hungary, but his apartment felt spare, as if he had recently moved in. There was a double bed in the living room, where his parents slept, a table with a brown synthetic tablecloth, and some small, gaudy landscapes on the walls. The police had taken his DVR.

Pinto was spending most of his time thinking about his case. According to the arrest warrant issued by the Portuguese authorities, he was being held on six charges, relating to the alleged blackmailing of Doyen and the hacking of Sporting Lisbon contracts in the fall of 2015. The warrant made no mention of the Benfica e-mails and the subsequent embarrassment for Portugal’s biggest soccer club, which Pinto was convinced were the real reasons for his arrest. “Politicians, prosecutors—even police detectives—they lose their focus when it comes to football,” he said.

When I asked Pinto if he had anything to do with the Benfica scandal, he denied it, in Pintoesque fashion: “I’ve never seen a statement from the police or the Portuguese authorities linking me to this.” He worried that his gargantuan data set, of which Der Spiegel possesses only around fourteen per cent, might be lost or destroyed if it were handed over to the Portuguese police. He was also afraid of being attacked by Benfica’s most notorious supporters, a group called the No Name Boys. I asked Pinto if he was aware of the irony of being killed by soccer fans. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’m aware of that.”

The following week, Pinto had an extradition hearing at Budapest’s central courthouse. I arrived early, with Buschmann. The corridor outside the courtroom filled with news crews and lawyers. Bourdon was there, wearing a long green overcoat. Pinto is five feet six inches tall. When he appeared, led by two thickset Hungarian police officers, he looked like a student on a Eurail trip gone wrong. “He is a cat,” Bourdon murmured. “A poor, fragile cat.” Extraditions between E.U. member states are almost always routine affairs. When the judge ordered that Pinto and his data be handed over to the Portuguese authorities, Bourdon slapped his rollerboard suitcase in frustration. After the hearing, Pinto sat on a bench in the corridor in handcuffs and gave an impromptu news conference to some Portuguese journalists. “I did this for the public,” he said. “I did this for all football fans.” The journalists wanted more, but Pinto seemed to dry up. “What else can I say?” he added. “I have to go to a Hungarian prison.”

Pinto was extradited to Lisbon on March 21st. Three days before he was handed over to the Portuguese police, Belgian prosecutors came to Budapest and copied all his data. Pinto’s hard drives, which are heavily encrypted, are what he hopes will eventually secure his freedom. “It is one thing to copy them—it is another thing to have access to them,” a member of his legal team told me. In February, prosecutors from Eurojust, the E.U.’s judicial-coöperation unit, met in Brussels to discuss how to analyze the Football Leaks data in a systematic way. Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux, of the P.N.F., described Pinto as a whistle-blower and confirmed that the French authorities had looked at twelve million documents so far. The following month, UEFA announced that, as a result of the Spiegel coverage, it was investigating Manchester City, the newly crowned English Premier League champions, for breaking its financial rules. The club faces a potential ban from the Champions League. “You don’t have to convince me that Pinto is at risk of one day being convicted as a hacker and for stealing information. It’s true, there is a risk. But Snowden did the same,” Bourdon told me. “There is a principle of proportionality—of the violation of the law compared to the services rendered. Pinto came from nowhere and he opened the eyes of millions and millions of citizens.”

In Portugal, Pinto’s return was front-page news. When I was in Lisbon last month, an impersonator was playing him on Portuguese late-night TV. The name of the character was Rui Pinto, the Hacker. In the last months of the Benfica Market, which has gone quiet since Pinto’s arrest, the blog took on a broader, anarchic quality, posting e-mails from one of Portugal’s largest law firms, and also secret judicial documents. Although Pinto denies any involvement, he is widely seen as a figure of general, youthful rebellion in a country where other forms of activism have been absent. “Rui is literally one in a million,” Carreira da Silva, the sociologist, told me. He is also a hero to everyone who hates Benfica. During my conversation with Marques, F.C. Porto’s communications director, we discussed the greatest recent figures in Portuguese soccer: Mendes, the agent; Mourinho; Ronaldo. “Now we have four,” Marques said. “Football after Rui Pinto is better.”

While Pinto awaits his trial, he is being held at a prison next to police headquarters, in central Lisbon. Francisco Teixeira da Mota, Pinto’s Portuguese lawyer, told me that he expected prosecutors to try to add the theft of Benfica’s e-mails to the case. “That is a risk that can happen at any moment,” he said. Pinto is being kept away from the other prisoners, for his own protection, but when he is allowed to exercise or to venture outside his cell he sometimes hears them yell his name, in what he takes to be encouragement. To pass the time, he has been reading a book about espionage during the Second World War. I once asked Pinto whether he was an idealist, and he surprised me by seeming not to know the word. We were in his apartment in Budapest. He opened a laptop and looked it up. “A person who is guided more by ideals than by practical considerations,” Pinto read from the screen. “Utopian, visionary, wishful thinker, fantasist, fantasizer, romantic, romanticist, dreamer.” It was enough. “Maybe this word applies to me. Maybe, yes.” ♦