Is "The team are playing well" correct?

Why

Disha is reasoning from what a team actually IS in real life — a group of separate, individual people — which is a completely sensible fact to notice. Grammar, though, cares about how the WORD behaves, not just what it describes: "team", "family", "class", and "government" are called collective nouns, and in the standard usage generally taught in Indian schools they are treated as ONE single unit, taking a singular verb, even though they refer to many members. The word "team" is grammatically singular in form (one team, two teams), and the standard rule follows that grammatical form rather than the number of people inside it. Test: notice you naturally say "the team HAS a match today", not "the team HAVE a match" — that same singular pattern applies consistently across "is/are", "has/have", and every other verb form with these collective nouns. Her teacher is right: "team" takes a singular verb, "is", following its grammatical form as one single group rather than the number of individual people inside it.