Journal Entry #2: Soccer Article: Broken down Toulmin Style

Journal Entry #2

Recently, I wrote about an article that discussed the so-called "natural born intolerance" Americans have developed for soccer. The claim being made is that Americans, typically having a weaker understanding of the game as well as a love for rough sports, target soccer as a game for the physically weak or "geeky" athletes. This claim was supported by writings in multiple nation-wide prints including the Washington Post, The New York Times, and Boston Globe. The claim was warranted by the American masses' significantly stronger support of "rougher" sports; such as American Football. Backing might be found in the Ivy Leagues replacing of soccer with rugby, supposedly because soccer was not rough enough. Grounds to support this back-up include the fact that much more money goes to football, and more scholarships are provided for football. Football costs more to watch, and given the general consensus that continues to be passed around, "football is just plain better" (an American might say). The qualifier is that the Ivy leagues might have replaced soccer for another reason, we cannot simply assume that they replaced it with rugby because it was not rough enough. A rebuttal might contain the fact that technically competitive soccer was invented in America, and the game quite frankly couldn't be "naturally intolerated" by its own inventors.