Football clubs like ‘Gor Mahia’ are plural nouns

NAIROBI: As local sports journalists write about the world’s most popular sport – the beautiful game, also called soccer in some countries – they should avoid writing, for example, that “Gor Mahia has thrashed Tusker 3-0, Man U is on the verge of qualifying for the second round of the Champions League, and Chelsea is at the sixes and sevens”. How and why are these constructions ungrammatical?

No, they aren’t faulty sentences. In sports, ‘teams’ falls into the class of collective nouns. These words can be both singular and plural, and sometimes one has to reason to know whether to pluralise them or not – this is what makes them problematic. In the British English (BrE), collective nouns, also known as group nouns, are words denoting a number of individuals. They’re grouped together because they are units of a family, class, team, etc. When they refer to a collection of individual objects/people, rather than a group as a single unit, they take plural verbs and plural pronouns. But when they’re seen as single units, they become singular, taking verbs and pronouns (all in singular form). For example, “Tim’s family have opted to move to the rural area; they think life there is easy”. “A modern African family comprises four members; this is smaller than a traditional African family”. Collective nouns can also be viewed as singular and plural at the same time, for example, “The public is/are fed up with corruption in this country; the audience is/are having a performance of its/their life; the Jubilee government hasn’t/haven’t achieved its/their election pledges”.