As one of those Americans who hasn’t paid much attention to soccer, I was presented with some opportunities for growth during the recent 39 days of World Cup competition - like, for example, this sentence from an analysis of the final game: “Spain,” it said, “were the better team throughout.”
There it is, one of the great mysteries of football, as the rest of the world has it: Spain were. In my mind, Spain was. Or is. But most certainly if it is “was,” it wasn’t “were.”
What’s with the plural word here? Spain were the better team? Really?
Well, I’ve looked into this for you, and there’s history to blame. Because while kicking a ball back and forth (and very occasionally into a goal) dates to China’s Han Dynasty in about 200 B.C., the sport of soccer is really a British invention: The Football Association wrote the first standardized rules for the game in England in 1863. And the British version of English grammar honors something called “notional agreement” between subject and verb. That’s unlike American English, where we follow what’s called “formal agreement.”
So, instead of treating the country or the team as a single entity, the grammar focuses on the meaning - in this case, the team, which is a collective group of individual players. But notional agreement doesn’t quite carry through all the way. That is, true fans say, “Spain are the champion,” not “Spain are the champions.”
My advice? Don’t try to figure it out. Grammar, after all, is fluid. And I say this as somebody who has written and edited English professionally for more than a half-century: I think we need to recognize that sometimes rigid adherence to rules matters little. We could all do with a little more acceptance of what’s beyond our own little sphere.
After all, for most of human history, rules of grammar didn’t exist. In English, it really began in the 15th century, when Guttenberg built his printing press. And then in 1762, a Englishman named Robert Lowth published a book that invented a lot of rules for English, mostly based on Latin - like, banning double negatives, which other languages allow, or forbidding us from splitting an infinitive - which makes no sense, because sometimes to intentionally split an infinitive is to more effectively communicate, as I just did there, twice.
Some groundbreaking writers in the English language forged their own paths. Shakespeare, for example, invented words: In "The Taming of the Shrew," he turned a body part into a verb, when he had a character say, “He elbowed me aside.” And he added “un-“ to “comfortable” to give us “uncomfortable,” and added “-able” to “fashion” to create “fashionable.” Nor did Shakespeare care about double negatives: In "Richard III," he has a character say, “I never was nor never will be.”
But back to the plural in soccer – or, rather, in football, as long as we’re following England’s English here. This comes as Americans are debating another plural word’s use in a singular context – that is, the pronoun “they” as the preference of people who are uncomfortable with the gender-specific “he” and “she.”
I get that it can be confusing: “They are going to the store” could mean one person or it could mean a whole team who are world champion. But a huge share of the world’s languages are genderless, and their societies – in Turkey, Finland, Indonesia and China – seem to function just fine. And the use of “they” to signify just one person was accepted in English for a long time – by Geoffrey Chaucer, in "The Canterbury Tales," for example, and by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and, yes, by William Shakespeare.
The singular “they” only became wrong, so to speak, in the mid-1700s - by the rules of those same people who came up with that split infinitive thing: because it didn’t align with Latin.
Let’s be honest, though, these days a lot of people don’t like use of “they” to refer to one person because they’re uncomfortable with anything other than the traditional gender binary. Linguists have studied this; they’ve found that people easily use “they” referring to one person until the “they” refers to a specific person who identifies outside the gender binary. That’s masking a social objection as a grammatical one – and it allows people to justify their discomfort in a way that feels intellectually defensible.
Folks, we need to get over that. Using the singular “they” for people who prefer it is simply an act of basic respect. It doesn’t need to be a badge of one’s political stance. We don’t need to turn a 300-year-old grammatical rule into a cultural battleground. Grammar ought not to matter as much as human dignity.
So in light of all that, I’ve decided that I can handle the way the Brits speak of soccer. Spain are a great team; they are world champion.
Winners, too, are those who reject rigidity - of language and thought - when it interferes with communication, or when it diminishes the respect that we each owe one another.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack."
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.