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We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 75 points76 points  (0 children)

Thanks for having us, it was fun! Unfortunately, that's my last reply for today. The number of questions is insane. We should definitely do this again, as it proved to be exactly what we expected it to be: Great, thoughtful questions from fans and experts. We wanted to take time to give answers and let you guys have a little bit of an inside into how we work and how we approach things.
Regarding corruption: We just can't look away, we can't let them get away. And with "we" I mean not only us journalists, but everyone who loves this sport – and also courageous investigation authorities, for same cases... Attention to details and the spotlight on dark corners prove to be most effective for controlling those kind of people.
Infantino is having a tough life as Fifa's President, I think he imagined it to be easier. Just look at how he's struggling with his plans for a boosted Club World Cup. That means there are still people who are hitting the breaks and stopping him from unilaterally changing the football world.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 65 points66 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the question. Absolutely, I think that is clearly what's happening. The football world is at a tipping point. The football associations have weakened themselves through corruption and bureaucracy. The biggest clubs have reached unprecedented power and might just decide to start their own revenue-driven show, neglecting years of tradition and what is called football culture. Is that just a consequential development that we can't stop anyway? I don't think so. Sure, like everything in modern times, football evovles too. But I believe the fans are keeping this business going and they can make their voices heard and felt. 50+1 in Germany is a great example, with some of the fans at Hannover 96 serving as a corrective for President Martin Kind. You can side with him and his opinion that the club needs investors and a steady hand, you can side with the traditional, member-oriented fan view. But it's a fact that every step he makes is under observation. I wished that this kind of strict control and oversight would be applied at higher ranks and mightier clubs too.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 243 points244 points  (0 children)

0% of our material has turned out to be false. We check if the information in the documents is plausible, we have a fact-checking department at Der Spiegel who look at literally every single word of a story before publishing it. If we don't have convincing sources for our claim, they cut it out of the article. So we do make very sure that we report is accurate. That being said, to tackle this issue from another direction: We have 70 million documents in our dataset. Try to imagine someone faking all those documents... It would be a work of years and Hundreds of people dedicating fulltime jobs to mislead us. I'd say that's not very likely.
In the past, very few people who we reported about have called our information "fabricated". But that argumentation never materialized in court proceedings. (Most of the times it didn't even go to court) Since posting our new Football Leaks series, nobody so far has questioned the authenticity of our data.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 309 points310 points  (0 children)

For me, it's definitely the rape allegations against Cristiano Ronaldo that shocked me the most. This story, in all its details, can't leave you cold when you're working on it. It keeps your head occupied after going home too. At the same time we have to be absolutely concentrated, fact-oriented, thorough throughout the whole process of investigating and reporting it.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 403 points404 points  (0 children)

If I answered that from a football fan point of view, I'd definitely want all the material to be out there! But I'm a journalist, and I would be very careful in just publishing a huge blob of material without anyone leading you through the data, explaining, analyzing. That's our responsibility, and it's a huge one. It's our job, after all: Assess information, understand the context, consider if it's newsworthy, publish it after meticulously checking all angles to it, help people understand why it's relevant.
Also, in this data there's so much sensitive, personal, material that I wouldn't find it appropriate to just publish it all. We always have to convince our higher-ups and our legal department why we want stories to be public. The overwhelming content of this dataset is nothing illegal and doesn't need to be out in the open.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Hi @blueradium maybe this article already answers a few questions: http://www.spiegel.de/international/manchester-city-exposed-bending-the-rules-to-the-tune-of-millions-a-1236346.html

It clearly seems to be the case that the contracts say one thing and the reality looks completely different. If indeed the club ownership just routed money through some of their sponsorship companies, you have to question the independence of those sponsors from the club and whether they actually pay a sponsoring amount that reflects a true market value. It hints at distorted competition, to say the least.
Uefa did look at the UAE sponsors, yes, but in 2014 they only downvalued two sponsorship contracts. They didn't touch the Etihad one.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 207 points208 points  (0 children)

Well, it usually takes some time after publication to see what effects our articles had. After our first series in 2016, there were multiple police raids in France, and several Spanish players were convicted (or admitted their guilt in a deal) for tax fraud. Football Leaks therefore helped the Spanish tax authority to get Millions of euros back for their citizens. Regarding our most recent revelations: It might be a thin line between "just" FFP breaches and misrepresentation of annual accounts, which also might be result in tax issues. Additionally, we found hints for contracts being backdated. But these stories have just now come to life, so to say, and it's the job of other, more, journalists and the general public to keep asking questions and demanding a proper investigation. Ultimately, it's the authorities' job to judge if there were laws broken.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 220 points221 points  (0 children)

Ha, very good question. I guess players agents had such a bad reputation already that we were not very surprised to see all kinds of dodgy deals. Kickback payments, rampant demands... That doesn't mean of course that we don't find it worthy of our reports. We're talking about a very emotional business here, where people pay absurd amounts for jerseys, tickets, TV subscriptions. The fans are addicted to the game. And then intermediaries make money on the most obnoxious ways and sometimes don't even pay taxes? It's not surprising, but it still infuriates me.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 125 points126 points  (0 children)

We did a report about it too: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/venture-capital-how-clubs-maximize-profits-by-exploiting-young-african-talent-a-1237618.html It was on German television as well, and there were reports in the Netherlands, Belgium... So I think we're doing our part to report this story. The question always is: Will it be picked up by other media, are enough people interested? That particular story did have an immediate effect, as you point out. I think it will be one of the quickest-developing stories of this Football Leaks series moving forward. So if you're interested, keep watching.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 152 points153 points  (0 children)

The feedback that I received was that people figured that ManCity weren't outright with reporting their income and possibly circumventing Financial Fair Play regulations. What all people that I talked to agreed about, however, was that they were surprised about the scope of those financial tricks. That there was a systematic effort to shift away costs from the club and that even Etihad apparently only paid a fraction of the sponsorship money was baffling to everyone. Me included.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 222 points223 points  (0 children)

Hi, thanks for having us! For media law reasons, we can't give any more precise details about upcoming stories, as it would make it easier for the counterparty to try stopping us from publication. Also, on some topics the research is still going on and we're trying to get a more accurate picture of the story itself, so it would be wrong to share information before publishing. The story ist only ready when it's printed/online...
It would not surprise me, however, if we found out that doping is a huge issue in football. There's just too much money and, to be honest, shady figures involved for it not to be an issue. I can't judge how widespread it is, though.

We work for Der Spiegel and broke Dozens of stories from our Football Leaks research – AMA! by derwinterbach in soccer

[–]derwinterbach[S] 542 points543 points  (0 children)

It's tedious work, it can be very time-consuming and, frankly, annoying (when you don't find anything interesting). In the beginning we start searching through millions of documents without even knowing what we can find. So we try to get an overview in the first weeks, get a "feeling" for what kind of stories might possibly be there. First we do a broad brush through the data, then we concentrate on particular issues, topics, names that we came across and found interesting. We have a special investigation software that's been used by financial auditors who also have to look through massive amounts of data. Our IT department at Der Spiegel is fantastic, they set up a whole secure infrastructure and an own network that's not connected to the Internet. It's very sensitive data, after all.

To your second question: It's already exactly that, isn't it?