In the summer of 2003, Mexico didn’t know it, but the Sinaloa Cartel had triumphed in Mexican soccer. It was June 21, and the residents of Irapuato, Guanajuato, had their eyes fixed on the Sergio León Chávez Stadium: the home team, *La Trinca Fresera*, was playing the return leg of the Promotion Final. If the Irapuato side won, they would return to the First Division after a three-decade absence. To make the victory even sweeter, they would advance to the country’s top league by eliminating their arch-rival—fellow Guanajuato club, Club León—along the way.
Accounts from that afternoon describe a thrilling match. Irapuato took the field with a 2–1 lead from the first leg, while León attacked relentlessly, trying to level the aggregate score and force the game into a penalty shootout. However, it didn’t even go to overtime: Brazilian player Josías Ferreira pulled off a dream solo play and scored for Irapuato in the 81st minute. With nine minutes left, the aggregate score stood at 3–1. Victory was mere seconds away. The ascent was complete.
The match took place in 2003.
Images from the match show a stadium erupting in jubilation—a red heart (the team’s official color) beating powerfully, aided by the fact that, for security reasons, Club León’s supporters’ group had been denied entry. More than 25,000 people celebrated the return to glory: televised matches, Sunday match reports, grand stadiums, the gleaming trophies that immortalize commoners, and the possibility—remote yet attainable—of one day becoming champions.
One of those euphoric fans was Tirso Martínez Sánchez, the club’s owner, who was harboring a secret: he wasn’t merely a sports entrepreneur, but a front man for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The Sinaloa Cartel was celebrating.
The footballer started out moving kilos of drugs in Guadalajara.
In early 2003, Tirso Martínez Sánchez was a millionaire collector of soccer teams. He had acquired Club Deportivo Irapuato, the Venados de Yucatán (Mérida), and the Reboceros de La Piedad (Michoacán). He also had his sights set on increasing his influence over the Gallos Blancos de Querétaro. These were teams in the Mexican professional soccer league’s second tier—then known as *Primera División A*—where regulatory oversight was lax and it was relatively easy to launder money, fix matches, run illegal betting rings… or use team buses to transport drugs. This last activity was Tirso’s specialty.
For before becoming a sports entrepreneur, he was a drug trafficker. Born in December 1966 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, he sought—while still very young—to ingratiate himself with the criminals of the era, men who already held local kingpins like Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (founder of the Guadalajara Cartel) in awe and twisted admiration. Tirso started out moving just a few kilos of drugs within his city. Later, he expanded across Jalisco. Then, he moved into the Mexican Pacific corridor connecting Baja California with Guerrero.
Soon, mere kilos were no longer enough, and he needed new drug suppliers; he turned south and found “Los Mellizos” in Colombia—the brothers Víctor and Miguel Ángel Mejía Munera, of the narco-paramilitary group Los Nevados. By the 1980s, any drug trafficker with grand ambitions needed to prove he had connections beyond Mexico, and Tirso Martínez Sánchez craved the glory of organized crime. Yet domestic connections were just as vital as international ones, so Tirso also sought to get close to the most influential kingpins of his time. He became a *compadre* to Amado Carrillo Fuentes—”El Señor de los Cielos” (Lord of the Skies)—and forged a deep friendship with Arturo Beltrán Leyva, known as “El Barbas.” From both men, he learned how to graduate to the league of traffickers who move tons of product. His modus operandi made him a millionaire in the late 1990s. Leveraging his knack for numbers, he built a transnational organization dedicated to the import, distribution, and transport of drugs; he would receive cocaine from Colombia and move it—primarily via trains—from Mexico to major U.S. states such as Texas, California, and New York. At times, trains weren’t enough, and the criminal network utilized ships, tractor-trailers, and tanker cars belonging to front companies.
“It is estimated that, between 2000 and 2003, Tirso Martínez Sánchez’s rail network imported, transported, and distributed approximately 76 metric tons of cocaine in the United States,” the U.S. Department of Justice alleged in 2000, the year the native of Guadalajara became one of the world’s most wanted men, with a five-million-dollar bounty on his head.
He had been exposed along with all his aliases: Tirso Martínez Sánchez went by the names José Tirso Hernández Félix and Manuel Ochoa Martínez. He used several criminal monikers—*El Doctor*, *El Mechancio*, *El Centenario*, *El Tío*—but the one that best described his time in organized crime was simply *El Futbolista* (The Soccer Player).
*El Futbolista* bought soccer teams with dirty money.
We know the criminal history of “El Futbolista” because he recounted it to the world himself. Fourteen years after the United States set its sights on him, Tirso was arrested in León, Guanajuato, following six months of covert surveillance on his home in the La Martinica neighborhood. He spent several months in the Altiplano maximum-security prison in the State of Mexico before being extradited to the United States in 2015. That transfer—a prospect most criminals dread—proved to be his salvation.
In the U.S., Tirso was given a golden opportunity: to become a cooperating witness in the so-called “Trial of the Century”—the case against his old friend and associate, El Chapo Guzmán. He was also called to testify in a second trial: that of the former federal Secretary of Public Security, Genaro García Luna. That was when his secrets were revealed to the world: how he went from being an obscure trafficker to a soccer entrepreneur, and finally to an informant against the Sinaloa Cartel.
Tirso recounted that by the late 1990s, his criminal enterprise had generated around seventy million dollars. It was an immense amount of illicit cash—and a massive risk. Consequently, he began investing the money in various business sectors to obscure the illegal origins of his fortune. He bought soccer teams, motivated both by the ease with which Mexican soccer could be used for money laundering and by his own unfulfilled dream of becoming a professional player. Despite being a wanted man in the eyes of U.S. authorities, he managed to project the image of a respected businessman in Mexico.
“El Futbolista’s” façade began to crumble a year after Club Deportivo Irapuato’s championship victory. In 2004, Alberto de la Torre—then president of the Mexican Football Federation—convened a Council of Owners to audit the financial stability of soccer entrepreneurs and determine whether they could sustain a team in the First Division. In other words: buying new players, covering coaching staff salaries, funding the daily operations of a top-tier stadium, paying to maintain a healthy youth academy, and incurring other multi-million-dollar expenses. Tirso’s accounts didn’t add up. There were shortfalls, undocumented expenses, and shell companies. Alarm bells rang.
Months later, in July, the then-Deputy Attorney General José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos announced to the media that his agents were investigating three suspected drug traffickers linked to Mexican soccer. He provided no names, aliases, or teams, but his candor shook the Mexican soccer world and forced Alberto de la Torre to offer a terse explanation that raised more questions than it answered: “In the interest of a better spectacle, and to create a Premier League worthy of the Mexican soccer family, we agreed to reduce the number of teams from 20 to 18 for the upcoming tournament.”
“The Mexican Football Federation apparently discovered who you were and offered to buy the teams from you—is that correct?” Judge Brian Cogan asked Tirso Martínez during the trial of El Chapo, according to interrogation transcripts obtained by journalist Jonathan Collado of Mediotiempo. The self-confessed trafficker nodded.
Alberto de la Torre didn’t go into detail until years later: after a review of the teams, it became clear that Club Deportivo Irapuato and Gallos Blancos de Querétaro had been infiltrated by organized crime. Millions of pesos were being laundered at the expense of the fans. Given the sums involved, it could only be the work of a drug cartel. Worse still, it wasn’t just a matter of financial crimes; there was suspicion that drugs were being transported in team bus cargo holds, hidden among uniforms and soccer balls, said Deputy Attorney General Vasconcelos. They had to be removed from the league, but without a scandal. The 2006 World Cup in Germany was approaching, and it was imperative not to jeopardize the National Team’s qualification.
It took Mexican soccer two years to excise the tumor nicknamed “El Futbolista” (The Soccer Player): Alberto de la Torre and the other partners scraped together $14 million and purchased Tirso’s teams in 2006. Once acquired, they expelled them from Mexican soccer. Cast out, they were tossed aside like a shameful chapter in the history of the national sport. The loyal fanbase of *La Trinca Fresera* lamented the decision.
The days of glory and euphoria at Irapuato’s Sergio León Chávez Stadium haven’t returned since.
Where is “El Futbolista” today?
Once stripped of his teams, “El Futbolista” devoted his money and efforts to evading Mexican and U.S. justice. He chose Guanajuato as his hideout, traveling to Mexico City to undergo multiple surgeries to alter his face and physique—much like his associate “El Señor de los Cielos” had done before dying in 1997 from an alleged medical complication. Tirso altered the shape of his eyes, refined his nose, and had fat removed from his face and abdomen to look younger and avoid recognition. The postoperative pain and the money spent were all in vain—as were the aliases he adopted. He was arrested without resistance on February 2, 2014; the government touted the fact that the arrest was made without a single shot being fired.
Following his appearances in the trials of Chapo Guzmán and Genaro García Luna, Judge Brian Cogan rewarded his cooperation; what could have been a life sentence turned into a very brief 84-month prison term in February 2020, taking into account the years he had already spent in custody.
“I have never seen a defendant expose himself to such extraordinary risk as this,” Judge Cogan said regarding “El Futbolista,” according to CNN. The leniency of the punishment drew a response from Chapo’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman. “The government is once again ensuring that a dishonest, maniacal criminal goes free and roams the streets among innocent, law-abiding citizens as a reward for having helped convict El Chapo Guzmán,” the lawyer said.
Today, no one knows for certain where *El Futbolista* is. He was released from prison at some point in 2023 and is now living under supervised release or in the U.S. witness protection program—just in time to watch the 2026 World Cup from the comfort of his home.
Source: Milenio
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