Use of plurals for singular organisations

Question

In spoken and written British English (perhaps more commonly the former), people tend to use plurals for singular organisations. For instance, "Liverpool are on top of the table", or "The Treasury are aware of the severity of the economic crisis".

Is this correct English? Or merely colloquial and local to the UK and Ireland?

Does this answer your question? If collective nouns use the plural verb form, are they plural in other contexts too? And, from Subject-verb-agreement ... two schools of thought (originally Garner): 'This construction is correct because of the linguistic principle known as SYNESIS, ... — Edwin Ashworth, Mar 25 '20 at 19:34
which allows some constructions to control properties such as number according to their meaning rather than strict syntactical rules.' (The other side of the argument is also given. Many people outside the UK think that notional agreement is more flexible, and even in the US there are examples where almost everyone uses it.) Also, Collective nouns and subject-verb agreement ... general rule, or arbitrary? (this addresses the generally different US/UK etc stances). — Edwin Ashworth, Mar 25 '20 at 19:39
By the way, most people in the UK would say/write/print 'the team are playing magnificently at the moment' but 'the team was founded in 1892': agreement is notional / logical, not 'always a plural verb-form' as some think. — Edwin Ashworth, Mar 25 '20 at 19:48
@EdwinAshworth Shouldn't you write these comments as a proper answer? They seem like pretty good answers to me. — Robin Winslow, Aug 14 '20 at 16:36
Although as a British English writer, I have the following follow-up question: Does it sound very strange to an American English or International English reader to write "Liverpool are at top of the league"? Because although I might write in British English, if I'm writing on the internet I'm more than likely to be writing for an international audience. I think this sort of grammatical difference might potentially be more jarring to readers than, say, the difference between writing "organisation" and "organization". — Robin Winslow, Aug 14 '20 at 16:40
@Robin Winslow I probably already have done. Have you checked the mooted duplicates? // I'm not sure why the 'this is a duplicate' close-votes have disappeared. — Edwin Ashworth, Aug 14 '20 at 16:54
Does this answer your question? If collective nouns use the plural verb-form -are they plural in other contexts? (and others mentioned above). — Edwin Ashworth, Aug 14 '20 at 16:57
Yeah I read those. They didn't quite answer specifically the question of how weird use of plurals for collective nouns sounds to an American or international ear. — Robin Winslow, Aug 24 '20 at 23:03

Use of plurals for singular organisations

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