Yesterday, as Matt Heath was leaving this studio after The Huddle, I asked him if he was going to any FIFA Women’s World Cup games.

He turned around and laughed and made an observation along the lines of- you can force people to do a lot of diversity stuff, but you can’t force them to buy tickets to entertainment.

Isn’t that exactly right.

The Government can force their agencies to fill half their boards with women, the Labour Party can try to force itself to get to 50 percent women MPs, and public broadcasters can force their hosts to mihi in te reo.

But no one can force you to buy tickets to a women’s game of football if you don’t want to go.

Matt's words came back to me this morning as I listened to Grant Robertson and a media outlet basically trying to shame us into buying tickets.

Grant Robertson said New Zealanders need to "pick up their game" around ticket sales. The media outlet paraphrased him by saying New Zealanders needed to do better. 

The tone there is that we are obligated to do something that we are refusing to do. But that’s not how sport works.

We are not obligated to buy the tickets. It's entertainment. And if we don’t want to watch women’s football, we don’t need to.

The origin of this frustration seems to be that the tickets are selling much faster in Australia than they're selling over here. We've bought less than half of the 900,000 available tickets to matches in New Zealand.

There's probably simple explanation for that- our women’s football team is ranked 22nd in the world, the Australians are 12th. We care a lot less because we know our team hasn’t even got a shot at the finals.

Now we might just be leaving it to the last minute. And once the hype is in full swing, we might yet buy all the tickets available. We'll have to wait to see.

But know this- if Kiwis do buy those tickets it’s because they want to go. Not because they’re being diversity-shamed into going.  

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