Personally, having been on both sides of lopsided scores, I find it very educational when a team that is clearly better than mine plays possession. It is an education for my players both to see how to possess the ball as an offense and to learn how to defend without chasing the ball. Maybe a team that is even in skill would be offended, but then they wouldn't be down 9-10 goals.
Another poor thing about running the score up is that the losing team's future opponents (especially the kids) feel that it is a benchmark to measure themselves by which can really hurt a struggling team--for example, if Mann puts up 19, another team feels like they have to exceed 19 to show they are better than Mann. This is very adolescent thinking, but we are dealing with adolescents...
