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Old October 09, 2020, 04:02 AM
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Interesting question. etymonline.com says that "spoils" is a collective singular. The British National Corpus doesn't have enough relevant data to say anything, but the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 41 instances of "go the spoils" and 18 of "goes the spoils".

So the answer is probably that traditionally "spoils" was singular, but in current common usage it is more often than not reanalysed as plural.

(Contrast with "data", which is traditionally the plural of "datum" but in current common usage is generally treated as a non-count noun).
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