The Netherlands or the Netherlands?

The championship game will be played Sunday between Spain and The Netherlands.

The above sentence was quoted from VOA news.
Could we use "the" instead?

From tien-sung

Taipei

I proofread a lot of legal documents coming from our Amsterdam office and they use both. The style guide in my company recommends that we just make it consistent. That said, lower case is more common and, it would seem, more logical - we don't usually write The United Kingdom, The United States, The People's Republic of China, etc. Indeed we tend to put the 'the' into initial lower case when a proper noun begins with 'the' except where it's in a heading. Take, for example, the newspaper I read: it is 'The Guardian' in the small-print header at the top of each page but 'the Guardian' when it appears in articles within the newspaper.

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Just to add, we say 'Holland' when referring to the football team, even though 'Holland' comprises only the 2 most dominant provinces of the Netherlands, North Holland and South Holland. Otherwise, 'the Netherlands' is correct usage.

We do, however, often say 'Holland' colloquially when referring to the country, although I would recommend saying 'the Netherlands' when speaking to a Dutch person lest they live outside the provinces of Holland and take exception to their country being referred to as 'Holland'.

bertietheblue said:

Just to add, we say 'Holland' when referring to the football team.

Click to expand...

I stand corrected: the BBC coverage showed the score as 'Netherlands v Spain', although in the newspaper I read today, discussion was of 'Holland v Spain'. I guess the BBC endeavours to be more correct.