Before learning to wait, Lucía Pardo learned to run.
She began playing in the garden at home with her father and brother. Football ran in the family: her father had been a goalkeeper and decided early on that his daughter should not rely on just one foot.
He insisted that she use her left. Pardo would become angry and frustrated. Years later, she acknowledged that his persistence had taught her to strike the ball with both feet.
She first played futsal with her classmates in Outeiro de Rei. She then moved to Azkar before joining Milagrosa, where she had her first experience in a girls’ team. Her switch to 11-a-side football also came down to something simple: she felt the court had become too small for her.
She liked to run and attack space. She needed more room ahead of her.
In January 2015, shortly after turning 15, she joined Friol. She scored on her debut for a team then competing in the second tier and remained there until Madrid CFF came calling in 2021.
From the outside, her path appears straightforward. It did not always feel that way to her.
During her early years, Pardo struggled before matches. Her nerves could make her vomit and, for a time, were compounded by coeliac disease that had not yet been diagnosed. She loved football and enjoyed herself once the match began, but the pressure she placed on herself turned the hours beforehand into an ordeal.
She gradually learned to manage it. She cannot remember a specific moment when everything changed. She simply grew older and the anxiety began to loosen its hold.
In Madrid, she had to confront a different kind of frustration.
She arrived to play for the reserve team while regularly training with the senior side. She featured little during her first season. Until then, she had been accustomed to feeling important, and discovering that she could work all week only to remain on the bench was difficult to accept.
She has admitted that she would sulk when she did not play. Conversations with María Pry and Víctor Martín helped her understand that not playing was also part of the job and that she could not always measure her worth by the minutes she received on a Sunday.
Her opportunity eventually came.
In September 2022, during her first season as a full member of the senior squad, Pardo scored against Alavés. Madrid CFF won 1-2, and her goal became the first scored in Liga F after the top flight acquired professional status.
She did not know it at the time.
After scoring, she ran towards Gabi Nunes, who had provided the assist, and celebrated with her teammates. She only understood the significance of the moment after the match, when she checked her phone and found an unexpected flood of messages.
Pardo had made history without realising it.
That detail fits a career that has never been built around a single moment. The goal gave her a permanent place in the competition’s record books, but it did not automatically make her an established player. She still had to earn her place, learn how to keep it and show that she could offer more than one historic date.
When asked to describe herself, she chose two words: explosive and quick. She also explained that she could play anywhere across the attack, although she preferred starting from the left wing.
That was no coincidence.
The girl who had outgrown the futsal court had turned her ability to run into space into one of her main strengths. Her father’s insistence had also given her the ability to finish moves with either foot.
In 2024, she left Madrid to join Real Sociedad. As she later explained, she was looking to take “another small step”: better conditions, greater demands and the chance to compete near the top of the table.
Over two seasons, she made 53 league appearances and scored twelve goals. In the second, Real Sociedad finished third, behind only Barcelona and Real Madrid. Pardo was no longer the player trying to understand why she had been left on the bench. She had become a regular attacker for one of the strongest teams in the competition.
She now returns to Galicia to play for Deportivo, having signed a contract until 2028.
The move completes a geographical circle, but it does not take Pardo back to the same place from which she started. The player who left Friol in 2021 needed to discover whether she could earn a place in the top flight. The one returning has learned to live with nerves, distance, the substitutes’ bench and the demands of competing among the best.
Her dream remains to play in the Champions League or at a World Cup. She has never hidden it. Nor does she appear to have looked for shortcuts on the way there.
Lucía Pardo began by wanting a bigger pitch on which to run.
Since then, her career has been about learning what to do once she finally found all that space ahead of her.