You do get the occasional mad scoreline like that in real life too. I recall when my beloved Reading lost to Portsmouth a few years ago now...

I don't think we need a change. These scores are extrememly rare. I wouldn't want to eliminate a team's chances to score altogether at anypoint because Goal Differential can decide who advances and who does not, who gets promoted and who gets relegated sometimes.

Its a fair question from Dr. Beerman.  I would concur that outrageous scorelines are fairly rare in our league.  I'm thinking what we have in place is pretty good now.  In the regular Olmec leagues we tried to do something about blowouts...but in the end it seems to have resulted in both byzantine rules/code and seems over-emphasized for the fairly rare occurrence that is a major blowout.

Surely a simple deterrent to fielding a weakened lineup is to have a penalty of 1CP lost for every goal you lose by more than, say, five, to reflect loss of morale.

Not that I'm sure a rule is necessarily required, but this one is at least simple and attacks the main benefit that clubs have for fielding weakened lineups, which is to increase the chances of earning CPs in the other games.

Unfortunately, by requiring significant playing time for youth players in this league and being unable to use subs, there are plenty of times each season where a team with just two matches has to play a mostly youth lineup to keep development going.  And sometimes they run into a team still alive in the youth cup or having 3 or 4 matches to spread youth in, so the other team can come out with a whole lot more of the big guns in the match.  Blowout likely, and all-but-guaranteed in some cases.

As much as we'd like a system where teams could play their top lines and be punished for throwing matches, that would require an entirely different league that the youth played in to develop.  And no EL, so everyone could play at least a T14 every match, as the pro leagues usually do. Because most starters play in most matches all season long except for injury and the rare international game stealing a player for a match or two, there are contract clauses for membership that require every team to make a good faith effort to compete in every game under possible penalty of fines, loss of league points, etc.  Of course, fines in these leagues don't cost people jobs.  500k in the real world and heads are rolling somewhere...

With this league, the downside is that blowouts heavily skew the goal differential.  GD is the first tie break for league play.  All other things being equal, teams with identical records and points should have equal chance to win based on how they played.  When one team wins primarily because another team threw a match and gave up 10+ goals, the "fairness alarm" starts vibrating if not actually clanging yet.

The financial rewards for winning the Golden Boot are so minimal as to be inconsequential over the course of a season or two.  So the only real argument I can see in favor of further diminishing of goal scoring chances is because it could hurt some other manager's chances of winning the league solely because of some third manager's game play choices.

All that being said, the scenario worth worrying about requires two teams to finish identical on points in league play while having one of those teams win the goal differential on the strength of a blowout win vs. one team that then turned around and played the other team substantially harder. I don't see that scenario coming up often enough to make any new rules or changes to existing ones at this time.