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ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — The midfielder stepped up to take the penalty kick. It was a steamy, bright morning at Erico Galeano Stadium. In the stands, fans wearing yellow and blue stood up, squinting into the sun, focusing on the man with the number 10 on his back. On the sidelines, coaches crossed themselves as he ran toward the ball.

His name was Sebastián Marset. He had arrived at Deportivo Capiatá — a hardscrabble professional soccer team — out of nowhere. He drove a Lamborghini that he would careen across the gravel parking lot. He was square-jawed and handsome, covered in gold jewelry, Rolexes and ornate tattoos that ran down his right arm.

Marset was a mediocre player, with the skills of someone whose career peaked in high school. But when Capiatá’s coach, Jorge Nuñez, kept him on the bench, the players encircled Nuñez and told him that Marset needed to play.

“I kept wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’” Nuñez said in an interview.

And now here was Marset taking a critical spot kick. The score was 1-1. It was May 29, 2021, halfway through a tough season. A win could be the beginning of a turnaround.

Silence fell on the stadium, quickly followed by groans, coaches and staff recalled in interviews. The ball blazed five feet over the goal’s crossbar. Even the team’s security guard couldn’t hide his frustration, kicking the dirt, wondering aloud why Capiatá’s fate had been put in Marset’s hands.

Over the next two years, the reasons would become clear. Sebastián Marset, it turned out, was among the most important drug traffickers in South America, and one of the key figures behind a surge of cocaine arriving in Western Europe, according to Latin American, U.S. and European investigators.

Instead of hiding from authorities, he had used his fortune to purchase and sponsor soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe. U.S. and South American investigators would learn that he was using those teams to help launder millions in drug proceeds.

Along the way, Marset, now 33, deployed his power and wealth to fulfill a boyhood dream: He inserted himself into the starting lineups.

This story about Marset’s narco empire and his quixotic search for soccer glory is based on thousands of pages of internal documents provided by Paraguayan, Uruguayan and Bolivian police, wiretap transcripts obtained by The Washington Post, hundreds of Marset’s text messages as well as interviews with officials on three continents. Many of the officials — along with Marset’s associates, teammates, coaches, friends and former neighbors in Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia — spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns.

Marset’s odyssey reads like a transnational caper, bordering on the absurd. But it is a startling window into the level of impunity at the nexus of Latin American public life and the lower rungs of professional soccer, enabling drug traffickers to wield enormous influence in both worlds. Years after a global manhunt for him began, Marset remains at large.

His ascent was lightning fast — by age 28, according to a Paraguayan criminal indictment, Marset was moving cocaine and suitcases of cash across South America in a fleet of private jets. By 31, he had made more than $1 billion, authorities estimate. He placed stamps on his drug shipments that read “The King of the South,” the moniker he was trying to cultivate. He issued orders to deputies operating in four countries: where to put the cash, whom to pay off, how to hide the cocaine under packages of cookies or soybeans. He killed his enemies with no remorse, soliciting advice on how to disappear their bodies, according to his text messages, which were obtained and aggregated by the Paraguayan attorney general’s office.

Marset took breaks to play professional soccer — first at Capiatá — where he adopted the same assertive tone as when he coordinated drug shipments, imagining himself the midfield conductor, even as he struggled to keep up with his teammates. He paid $10,000 in cash to wear the No. 10 jersey, worn by Pelé, Maradona and Messi. When he shoved opposing players to the ground, referees failed to blow their whistles. Marset flashed a thousand-watt smile.

His rise coincided with the explosion in cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe. It was Marset who would help perfect that route, dispatching tons of drugs from Uruguayan ports to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, investigators say, forging ties with existing cartels around the world.

Building that empire and laundering its proceeds would bring Marset into contact with some of the continent’s most powerful politicians. Those ties were explicit: He borrowed a Paraguayan senator’s plane, he was caught trafficking drugs with the uncle of a Paraguayan president, and one of his lawyers secured meetings with top Uruguayan officials to secure his release from prison. Some of his most valuable connections, though, were in professional soccer.

The link between drug trafficking and soccer is almost as old as the U.S. drug war. Money spent on the sport is untraceable in much of Latin America. Player contracts, transfer fees, ticket proceeds, merchandise sales — almost all of it can be fudged, according to experts on money laundering, so that cocaine money used to fund a team is magically turned into soccer — and therefore clean — profits.

“The legitimization of illicit funds was done through sports,” the Paraguayan prosecutor’s office wrote in a 500-page internal investigation into Marset obtained by The Post.

It was more than that. Soccer in Latin America is the bedrock of power and politics. For a drug kingpin, running a soccer team, even in a lower league, translates criminal power into public power.

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin, bankrolled his hometown soccer club, Atlético Nacional, turning it into one of Latin America’s best teams. When he was detained in 1991, he flew in famous players to play on the prison soccer field. In the early 2000s, Tirso Martínez, an associate of Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, spent the millions he earned moving drugs to purchase several Mexican soccer teams. Martínez’s nickname was revealed after he was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2015: “El Futbolista.”

But Marset is the first major drug trafficker to use his status and wealth not only to bankroll professional soccer teams but to play on them. Some of his games were held just miles from where he had deposited the bodies of his cartel rivals, based on the descriptions in his text messages. Depending on whom you believe, his athletic career was either a sophisticated strategy to conceal his identity, or an attempt to fulfill an unrealized dream.

Asked which it was, Marset’s lawyer, Santiago Moratorio, laughed in his office in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital.

“He always wanted to be a soccer player,” he said.

As U.S. and South American authorities chased Marset across the continent, to the Middle East and to Europe, he was always one step ahead, vanishing only to reappear on another professional soccer field, often using a new false identity. He was able to bribe his way out of a Dubai prison as U.S. officials — who came to see Marset as a threat to public institutions across Latin America — watched in frustration. He left a trail of high-profile murders in his wake, authorities allege, including Paraguay’s anti-corruption prosecutor, gunned down on his honeymoon at a Colombian beach resort.

As he ran from authorities, Marset left voice notes and video messages, often mocking the officials who trailed him.

“I’m too smart for you,” he said in one video message last August. The camera was tightly framed around his face. He wore a gold chain and a neat beard.

“If you want, keep hunting me, but I’m telling you that I’m far away.”

Authorities knew they were unlikely to catch Marset in the middle of a cocaine bust. So they adapted their investigation to its target: They began scouring professional soccer stadiums.

II

Marset was born in Piedras Blancas, a neighborhood of small split-level homes on the outskirts of Montevideo. Uruguay had long considered itself the “Switzerland of South America,” with among the lowest crime rates on the continent. But in Piedras Blancas, as Marset entered his teenage years, young men suddenly appeared selling and trafficking drugs. Homicides ticked up.

He was a top student at school, a skinny, whip-smart kid who liked to stand in front of the room and lecture his classmates as if he were the teacher. As he got older, though, he became single-minded about his goal: He wanted to be a professional soccer player. He and his friends played in the street, constructing makeshift goals out of stones. They used markers to sketch numbers on the back of their T-shirts because they couldn’t afford uniforms.

Marset’s dream of soccer stardom was, at least in part, about money. He worked at a gas station and blew his salary on a David Beckham Adidas track jacket. He went to nightclubs frequented by girls from wealthier neighborhoods. Friends said they sometimes spotted him walking home alone because he couldn’t afford bus fare from downtown Montevideo.

After high school, he started playing semiprofessional soccer in Montevideo’s intermediate division. It became clear quickly that Marset would not go further. He wasn’t fast enough. His touch was mediocre, his passes wayward.