For all the weighing in by major sporting figures over the course of the past week, Manchester City’s ongoing legal battle with the Premier League traces back to a man most supporters would likely not recognise.

Rui Pinto, the Portuguese hacker-turned-whistleblower behind the Football Leaks disclosures, set the entire investigation in motion years ago, and the fallout from the Premier League's guilty verdict concerning Manchester City has pulled him back in.

For Pinto, the renewed prominence has come at a steep price having previously lived under state protection, while his situation has now changed in a manner that has led to concerns over his safety.

Portuguese authorities have now confirmed that Rui Pinto will no longer be shielded as a protected witness, in a decision that is said to have caught the 37-year-old off guard.

That move came barely two hours after he had rounded on FIFA president Gianni Infantino online, the latest of several interventions since the verdict in which he branded Manchester City’s executives cheats guilty of “a complete lack of respect for the rules”.

The practical consequences are stark, with Rui Pinto now reported to not only have no job, but also no home and no income, having lived in a safe house in a location never revealed.

Efforts to ease Pinto back towards a normal life have been shelved, according to reports, and he has been warned against returning home, contacting relatives, or spending time in busy public places.

For Manchester City supporters, Rui Pinto’s significance is hard to overstate. In fact, without him, there would in likely be no case. It was his vast cache of leaked documents that first drew UEFA, and later the Premier League, into scrutinising the club’s finances.

That material proved central to the charges, not least an internal memo in which chief executive officer Ferran Soriano wrote, “We will need to fight this and do it in a way that is not visible, or we will be pointed out as the global enemies of football.”

Manchester City have always rejected the notion that such evidence should count against them, and continue to insist they have done nothing wrong, with Soriano confirming this week that they would appeal a ruling they consider “unsafe”.

Rui Pinto himself has long waved away the suggestion his data is tainted. “The documents are authentic,” he said in 2019. “I don’t consider myself as a hacker, but as a citizen who acted in the public interest.”

Rui Pinto splits opinion in his homeland, cast by some as a criminal and by others as a whistleblower in the mold of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. He was granted protected witness status in 2020 after handing authorities access to several million files.

His own history with the courts is a complicated one, having received a four-year suspended sentence in 2023, convicted of attempted extortion, breach of correspondence and illegal accessing of data over an approach he once made to the agency Doyen Sports.

It is an episode he says he regrets, while maintaining he never took a penny, and one the trial judge dismissed his account of as “not credible”. This year, in a separate case, he was cleared on 241 counts of unlawfully accessing email accounts, and none of the material he gave Portugal’s authorities has itself produced a prosecution.

It is the human cost of the decision that has caused the most concern and Rui Pinto is said to have had a bounty placed on him after the Football Leaks and Luanda Leaks exposés. Across six years, he has appeared in public on just two occasions, one of which ended in an assault thought to have been football-related.

No reason has been offered for the withdrawal of his protection, with the Portuguese agency responsible staying silent. Whatever Manchester City’s supporters make of the man who dragged the club’s finances into the open, he now confronts the consequences of that crusade almost entirely alone.