A team is a collective, and can have a collective intent. Have you never participated in team sports? :-) I am surprised to see that you are in Canada. In the USA a team is usually grammatically singular: Chicago beats Houston. But in the UK it is more often plural: Manchester win again. I would have thought that Canada would follow the UK in this. Either way, "team" is grammatically a "collective noun." (My examples are dubious but I stand by my point.) In any event the last thing I would call a football team is an abstraction. Martin C. Tangora