English Experts

[Flavia.lm]

Pessoal,

Lendo uma entrevista com o Parreira, vi: "Brazil are a team that score many goals".
Pensei que ele de fato poderia ter dito errado e não quiseram editar. Mas encontrei outra, no site da Fifa, e não sei dizer se quem escreveu é nativo da língua inglesa ou não: "For whatever reason, it seems that Brazil are a team that I just seem to do well against."

Existe alguma chance de isso estar correto? Por qual razão?

tks in advance

[Henry Cunha]

It's correct, and frequent, when referring to a national teams. I personally also find it strange, and never speak that way, but it's common in the press. I don't know why it's considered useful.

[donay mendonça]

Pessoal,

Neste contexto já vi as duas formas.Porém confesso que ultimamente só tenho visto a forma no plural(Brazil are),e tenho lido bastante material da BBC e CNN.


Valeu!

[Flavia.lm]

some additional info:

"English media seems to almost always refer to teams and clubs (whether singular or plural) using “are”, while American media tends to go with “is”. Maybe this is rooted in the way sport has worked on different sides of the Atlantic, with English football clubs originally being a collection of players rather than a corporate entity (although that has obviously changed in recent years) and American sports teams identifying themselves early on as franchises, which is to say singular entities."
source & additional comments: http://www.theoffside.com/world-footbal ... m-are.html

Two good examples of collective nouns are "team" and "government," which are both words referring to groups of (usually) people. Both "team" and "government" are count nouns. (Consider: "one team," "two teams," "most teams"; "one government," "two governments," "many governments"). However, confusion often stems from the fact that plural verb forms can often be used with the singular forms of these count nouns (for example: "The team have finished the project"). Conversely, singular verb forms can often be used with nouns ending in "-s" that were once considered plural (for example: "Physics is my favorite academic subject"). This apparent "number mismatch" is actually a quite natural and logical feature of human language, and its mechanism is a subtle metonymic shift in the thoughts underlying the words.
Wikipedia = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

[dlr]

it must be a British thing, it seems completely wrong to me to say 'Brazil are a team that score'. I would say 'Brazil is a team that scores'.