Change is slow but gains have been made for gay players.
#Charlotte eagle gay bar reopens professional
Very few professional male soccer players are openly gay, although LA Galaxy defender Robbie Rogers came out in 2013. In starker terms that means the club they would not have a gay player on the team. And a mandatory statement of faith makes clear the organization’s opposition to “non-traditional sexual relationships”.
So I really adapted my game while I was there.”Ĭharlotte plays under the umbrella of the nonprofit group Missionary Athletes International (MAI). I learned a lot of that from them, that’s stuff that I really took in. You don’t see me going and yelling at refs. “There was a lot of playing the game with integrity, playing the game in a godly way,” recalls Ramirez, who spent the 2013 campaign with Charlotte while they were competing in the then USL Pro. Good on the field, even better off it, the mantra goes. “There are so many players who view their worth in terms of their performance, and that’s not really ultimately what their worth is based on,” says club president Pat Stewart. Their core values rest in a quest to play the game as what they see as the right way. They see themselves as crusaders on a mission to make a more upright breed of soccer player. “It used to eat at me it doesn’t any more.”Ĭharlotte’s Christian-centered approach to the global game makes them far from a regular soccer club. “You’re going to get viewed on wins and losses in this world, but that doesn’t make or break me,” Ramirez explains of his greatest takeaway from life with Charlotte.
There, the 25-year-old Californian tells the Guardian, he learned the value of winning – and losing – as a team. How did Ramirez learn to deal with such adversity? He believes his character was formed during a stint in North Carolina with the evangelical soccer outfit the Charlotte Eagles.