Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Young

Andrew Young’s line lands like a provocation disguised as plain talk: if money floods sport, more people get to play, watch, and belong. Coming from a clergyman who spent his life translating moral ideals into workable politics, the sentence has the cadence of a pragmatic sermon. It doesn’t romanticize purity; it bargains with reality.

The intent is to flip a familiar complaint. “Commercialization” usually reads as corruption: logos on jerseys, ticket prices climbing, athletes turned into content. Young reframes it as access. Commercial markets build stadiums, bankroll youth programs, spread broadcasts, professionalize women’s leagues, and turn regional games into shared national rituals. In that sense, commerce becomes infrastructure - not just profit, but distribution. Democratization here isn’t about citizen control; it’s about mass availability.

The subtext is thornier. Young’s equation implies that visibility equals inclusion, and that the fastest route to broad participation runs through corporate capital. That’s a distinctly late-20th-century civil-rights-adjacent logic: integrate the mainstream, get a seat at the table, use institutions as engines of opportunity. It also dodges who sets the terms of entry. Commercial sport can widen the audience while narrowing the experience: paywalls, exclusive merchandising, public subsidies for private franchises, “community” defined by consumers.

Context matters: Young helped bring the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta, a mega-event where corporate sponsorship and civic uplift were sold as the same project. His quote reads like a defense brief for that era’s faith that markets could do public good at scale - and a reminder that “democracy” can be invoked to bless whatever gets people in the door, even if someone else owns the building.