The Boston Legacy is not known for being gentle. The expansion team has earned more yellow cards and committed more fouls than any other club in the NWSL this year. On Sunday, that didn’t matter for Leicy Santos. At least twice, the Washington Spirit midfielder found herself with the ball cornered by three Boston players. With remarkable efficiency, she made them all look like fools. After a few deft touches and even better body positioning, she had evaded considerable pressure and released the ball to an open teammate. In fact, I’m not even confident that this didn’t happen more than twice; such is the grace with which Santos can slip out of impossible situations. You only see it if you’re looking for it.
Of course, there was no missing Santos’s contribution on the first goal of the match, a looping one-touch cross to Tara Rudd, who headed the ball back across the goal mouth above the hands of Casey Murphy. Washington went on to win the game 2-1. The performance wasn’t their most flashy, but it was impressive considering it came just four days after they played Gotham FC in abhorrently smoky conditions in New York City. Most starters from that Gotham game were rested against Boston. Santos was not one of them; she was one of only three outfield players to start both games, and played 170 minutes across the two contests.
Halfway into the season, the Spirit sit at the top of the table, and Santos is a big reason why. Her importance to the team is partly borne out of necessity; when the Spirit traded away Croix Bethune, the league’s most exciting attacking midfielder, before the season started, they didn’t bring anyone in to replace her. Fans of the perennial contenders were puzzled. Losing Bethune, as Yuki Nagasato tweeted, was losing the attack’s brain.
Santos was the team’s remaining no. 10, so the task of replacing Bethune has fallen squarely on her shoulders. It took a few games for Santos to heat up, but so far the 30-year-old has proven to be a reliable engine of the Spirit’s attack. Coach Adrian González knows it; Santos has played more than 80 minutes in all but two matches this year. The Spirit has more roster depth than any team in the NWSL—aside from, perhaps, Gotham—with the exception of Santos’s no. 10 role. There’s an inherent risk to depending on just one player to hold down such an important spot on the field, which only makes Santos’s contributions this season all the more valuable.
Santos’s default mode is quietly stalking the middle of the park, making herself available for her teammates, all while scanning the pitch to know where the best outlet or progressive pass will be once she’s given the ball. Sometimes, those passes help knit together elaborate attacks. Other times, they are line-breaking balls that become assists for speedsters Trinity Rodman and Claudia Martínez.
“I only ever think about contributing to the team, about helping the team. Then if assists or goals come, let it be consistent with the work that I try to do collectively,” Santos said in April, a few days after scoring two goals against the Kansas City Current. Those goals, and her first goal of the season, against Louisville, were right place, right time tap-ins, the kind that put a simple bow on a sequence of smart positioning and timing.
Santos has long provided highlight reel moments, but the frequency with which those moments come has accelerated this year. After 15 appearances this season, she’s scored five goals—only Rodman has scored more for the Spirit—and made four assists. In her previous 35 regular season appearances for the Spirit over two seasons, she scored four goals and made six assists total.
Santos has the capacity to deliver the best moments soccer can offer. Her latest goal was this year’s best NWSL goal yet, a full volley which she teed up for herself with an unreal first touch.
Leicy Santos with a BELTER for the Washington Spirit 🚀
— NWSL (@nwslsoccer.com) 2026-07-11T23:14:11.587Z
Santos is also a set-piece specialist, as evidenced by her putting away a direct free kick against the Seattle Reign on May 30. But that wasn’t even her best dead-ball goal of her short NWSL career. In the 2025 Challenge Cup, her magnificent free kick was the equalizer that pushed things to extra time; the Spirit would go on to win in a shootout.
The Spirit knew they were getting a steady hand when they signed Santos—she had previously spent five seasons as a fixture in Atletico Madrid’s lineup—but few would have expected her to be playing so well that Bethune is hardly missed. Santos has already matched her highest goal mark from her five seasons in Liga F, and is two assists shy from matching her best season as a distributor. All of this has earned her plenty of adoration from her manager.
“Leicy is a very beloved player here; everyone knows the talent she has,” González said. “For me, I would highlight above all her ability to overcome adversity. She is a player who hasn’t been given anything, who has had a very tough past and has had to work hard to be where she is. We love her very much.”
González was likely referring to the fact that at the age of 12, Santos moved her family from Lorica, a small town in Colombia, to Bogotá so that she could pursue her dreams of playing professionally—dreams she had believed in before there was the women’s soccer infrastructure in Colombia to make them possible. When she and her family moved, the entirety of their belongings fit in one taxi.
After carving out a successful domestic and international career for herself over the next decade-plus, Santos found herself at a crossroads when she left Liga F for the NWSL in 2024. It wasn’t an easy decision, and it was still weighing on her as recently as two months ago. “Sometimes I miss Madrid a lot. I miss it a lot. It was very hard to leave Atleti, very hard,” she said in a Spanish-language interview. “But the heartbreak has passed, the grief has passed.”
If heartbreak can be healed by newfound purpose, then Santos has found herself in the right place.
