Charlotte Eagles

In 2016, Charlotte's soccer club made international headlines for reasons that had nothing to do with results. The Guardian reported that Missionary Athletes International, the Christian nonprofit that runs the Eagles, held a policy excluding openly gay and bisexual players from its roster — a story that travelled far beyond the fourth tier of American soccer the club calls home.

MAI is the reason the Eagles exist at all. Bryan Davidson and Rick McKinney founded the club in 1991 not as a conventional franchise but as the nonprofit's sporting wing, a missionary project built around a soccer team. Professional status came in 1993, when the Eagles joined the USISL; the following decades took them through the A-League, the USL's Second Division and Pro tiers, and the PDL, before the competition was renamed USL League Two in 2019 and the club settled there.

Titles followed along the way — the USL D-3 Pro League in 2000, the USL Second Division in 2005, the PDL in 2017 — alongside a string of divisional wins going back to 1996. The closest the Eagles came to the top of professional soccer was 2013, when they reached the USL Pro Championship final and lost.

Home now is the Sportsplex at Matthews, a 2,300-seat ground in the Charlotte suburb of the same name; earlier years took the club through half a dozen venues, among them Patten Stadium and Transamerica Field, before it settled there. A women's side, Charlotte Lady Eagles, plays in the WPSL under the same badge.

Davidson and McKinney are still the names attached to what the Eagles were built to be — a missionary programme first, a soccer club second.