> Running up the score occurs when a competitor continues to play in such a way as to score additional points after the outcome of the game is no longer in significant question and the team is all but assured of winning. In the United States and Canada, it is considered poor sportsmanship to run up the score in most circumstances
> The term and the concept are not common elsewhere in the world.
> In professional soccer, the concept of "running up the score" is mostly unheard of;
Pulling your punches in the football world cup would indeed have been seen as the ultimate insult.
I wonder if this could have something to do with the popularity (well, the existence) of American Football. It's a very physical contact sport. Obviously, when a team is losing badly and the other is continuing to run up the score, emotions can run wild, and so there's a stronger possibility of unnecessary injuries. Maybe it's felt to be better to just "take a knee and run out the clock", where possible.
If you compare with baseball, I don't know that I've ever heard of a strong aversion to running up the score. Maybe you're not exactly sending out your substitute batter in the top of the ninth when you're up 10, but I've never seen a team give up and not put in a reasonable effort.
Wildly disparate scores seem pretty common in basketball as well. Even in college (American) football, scores of like 70-0 are not that uncommon. You only really quit trying in football when you can run out the clock, or you pull your starting players to prevent injuries.
Even in American football, there aren't really a lot of benchwarmers who are just there as backup. The backup quarterback obviously and teams do indeed sometimes put the backup in during the fourth quarter if they have a big lead. Though I doubt that would happen often in a playoff game. (And, yes, teams will manage the clock towards the end of the game but that's far more about playing it safe than having an aversion to running up the score.)
You're right, perhaps I should have been even more assertive that "not running up the score" isn't that big a thing even in American sports.
I think a clear case of this though is when a team has the ball with the lead and less than 2 minutes to go, and the other team has no timeouts, it's customary to just take a knee ("victory formation") rather than going on a drive and trying to score again.
That's not about not running up the score though. That's about doing the absolutely safest thing to run out the clock. Teams will do that even if they have a small lead because it's almost foolproof. (I'm sure some quarterback has fumbled though.)
