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The club continues their historic run as a professional team
Posted on Sept. 26, 2025, 1:49 p.m. | Categories: USL[This blog post was originally published on November 12, 2023.]
The 2023 USL Championship season is the 30th year of existence for the Charleston Battery. Tonight the teams is playing in the USL Championship Final against Phoenix Rising FC. While Phoenix is seeking their first professional title in their tenth season, Charleston is looking for their fifth over 31 seasons.
Along with the Richmond Kickers, the Charleston Battery joined the USISL in 1993. Those two clubs are the oldest professional U.S. soccer teams still in existence. The Kickers can claim to be the oldest playing their first match on the Columbia Spirit on April 30, 1993. The Battery’s first match came just one day later when they hosted the Kickers beating them 2-1 in front of 2132 at Stoney Field.
The 1993 season was the USISL’s last season solely as a non-professional concern. For the 1994 season, the USISL was sanctioned by U.S. Soccer as a men’s Division III professional league. In a somewhat strange transitional season, while the USISL in 1994 was itself sanctioned as a professional league, the individual teams within USISL were each sanctioned as professional or amateur teams.
Officially the 1994 USISL was split up into the Professional Group sanctioned by USISL and the Amateur Group sanctioned by the USASA.3 That structure was put in place per an agreement with the NCAA in order for the USISL’s amateur players to keep their college eligibility. The Charleston Battery (along with the Richmond Kickers) were part of the Professional Group’s South/Atlantic region.
The Charleston Battery’s first official match as a professional team was on April 24, 1994. Charleston hosted the Baltimore Bays at Stoney Field. With 1339 in attendance, the Battery won the match 1-0 off a 89th minute goal by Paul Young.
The Battery have been a professional soccer team for 10,794 days. While Richmond can claim to be the older club (11,152 days to 11,151 days), the Battery can claim to be the oldest continuing professional team in the U.S. That is because in 1995, the USISL officially split into completely separate professional and amateur leagues. The Battery continued as a pro club in the USISL Pro League while the Kickers decided to play the 1995 season in the amateur USISL Premier League.
Beyond that, it is also possible that the Charleston Battery can make the claim to be the longest running professional soccer club in all of U.S. history. The New York Americans played for 34 seasons in the original American Soccer League from 1931 to 1963-64 plus a final 1964-65 season in the Eastern Soccer Conference. While the American Soccer League was sanctioned by U.S. Soccer as a professional league the New York Americans were an amateur club during a period in the early to mid-1930s.
The only other U.S. soccer club with such a lengthly professional run is the club best known as the Philadelphia Americans. The team spent its entire 32 seasons of existence in the original ASL. The club began as the German-Americans in the 1933-34 season and was purely amateur in its earliest seasons before becoming professional around the same time as the New York Americans. The team became the Philadelphia Americans upon America’s entrance into World War II then, under new ownership, the Uhrik Truckers beginning with the 1953-54 season. The team would fold following the 1964-65 ASL season.
The Charleston Battery have almost certainly had a longer run as a professional club than the Philadelphia Americans. But there will be no argument once Charleston plays its 2024 season. And, while it is possible, though unlikely, that the New York Americans could still hold that title, once Charleston makes it to 2026 they will definitively claim the crown.
Last modified on Sept. 26, 2025, 1:51 p.m.