Plusieurs médias européens, dont le site français Mediapart, ont uni leurs forces afin de dévoiler la face cachée du sport le plus populaire au monde. L’affaire Football Leaks montre en effet comment ce sport est devenu un business rattrapé par les fraudes. Les premiers articles ont été publiés le 3 décembre dernier, mais les révélations continuent…

Les enquêtes se basent sur quelque 18 millions de documents fournis au Spiegel, le plus grand et le plus influent hebdomadaire allemand d’investigation, par  un lanceur d’alertes. La maison d’édition DVA, en coopération avec le magazine, publiera en avril 2017 un livre exclusif sur ces Football Leaks, écrit par les journalistes Rafael Buschmann et Michael Wulzinger :

The biggest data leak in the history of sport and what it reveals about the world’s best-known players, the men pulling the strings and big money in international football.Contains strictly confidential and highly explosive material, including the secret player contracts of Mesut Özil, Gareth Bale or Cristiano Ronaldo and the take-it-or-leave-it contracts of players’ agents

FOOTBALL LEAKS
The Dirty Dealings in International Football
A Spiegel Book
by Ralf Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger
DVA, April 2017

The fact that the world of football is less and less about sport and increasingly about dirty dealings is something football fans have been suspecting since long before the FIFA scandals. But « Football Leaks » sheds light for the first time on the shadowy world of this industry and the whole spectrum of the greed holding sway behind the scenes of international football.
Whistleblower « John » has handed over 1.9 terabytes of secret data to the weekly Spiegel, amounting to 18.6 million documents on negotiations, contracts and agreements – documents that reveal that for stakeholders in international football, be they clubs, players or powerful but largely littleknown players’ agents, morals and laws do not count. For Football Leaks, Rafael Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger spent months doing research and now describe the most important revelations they have collected from the huge mountain of data. Their book is at the same time a gripping story of a whistleblower who wants to liberate football from its Mafia structures – and is now himself being hunted.

Ralf Buschmann was born in Zabrze (Poland) in 1982 and studied German, psychology, sport and education. He joined the sports desk of Spiegel Online as a reporter in 2010 and then moved to the Spiegel in 2013. For his report on the disclosure of the irregularities behind the 2006 World Cup he and his co-authors were awarded the 2015 Henri Nannen Prize.

Michael Wulzinger was born in 1965, studied history, political science and German, and after stints with the daily Die Rheinpfalz and Badische Zeitung, joined the Spiegel sports desk in 1997 and was its head until September 2016.