I didn’t say that, the lack of relegation in the MLS is just one of the reasons American football is substandard (a minor reason probably, or even as you said a consequence and not a cause). (One of the other reasons is your refusal to call the sport by its proper name 
)
Correction: AAA is the level just below Major League Baseball. From top to bottom, the levels are MLB, AAA, AA, High A, Low A, and Rookie leagues.
Yeah sorry, I fucked that up pretty badly.
Bleh. I usually call it football, but my American compatriots assume I’m talking about the other football. And there’s also the fact that the word “soccer” originated in the UK, so we’re actually calling it exactly what the British [used to, and sometimes still do] call it.
Neither pro/rel nor “soccer” have one iota to do with how good the US is at the sport. Both are just ways for foreigners to condescend to Americans. Do Italians get shit for saying calcio?
The actual proper name is “Fulbo” or “Furbo” in the original Rioplatense Spanish, but at least you can call it by the bastardized English name of “Football”.
Have you ever played against Italian defenders? If Paolo Maldini wants to call the game “Pucklepuss” you say “Yes sir, thank you sir”
Maldini was elegant by Italian standards. Baresi on the other hand…
One you respect because you admire him, the other because you want to keep your legs more or less functional.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone British truly cares that you call it soccer, and other countries have their own names for it anyway. As long as we all know which sport we’re talking about it’s all good.
Just dipping in to respond to your original question - I’m a life long Aston Villa fan and would happily go to watch them if I happened to be in the US for the game and the tickets weren’t mad money, but they’ve had a long hard season so I certainly wouldn’t expect anything great from them. I’ve no doubt they’d all rather be at the beach until the new season kicks off again in August.
I actually gave consideration to buying a ticket to the STL-AV game but talked myself out of it. I’d have enjoyed exchanging repartee, badinage and bonhomie with the foreign fans who came to my country to watch a game. America is in kind of a bad mood right now, and I figured I could serve as an example of American hospitality and friendliness to foreign guests.
Even once you’ve mathematically qualified, though, doesn’t ranking usually determine seeding in the tournament, and maybe even a first-round bye?
And while American sports don’t have promotion/relegation of whole teams, we do have something similar for individual players. It not-uncommonly happens for a baseball player to spend one year in the majors, and then go back down to AAA, or the like. Of course, since these are among the weakest players in MLB, they don’t get noticed much.
A manager might well choose to keep the best players off the field in a game that “doesn’t matter”, to keep them rested, but if you’re on the field, there’s an incentive for you, personally, to look good, for the sake of your own personal career.
I’m reviving this thread because something that was discussed in this thread came up in an episode of Welcome to Wrexham that I just watched. They signed a big-deal up-and-coming young player, and him his interview for the camera, he spoke of how he first started being taken seriously as a star (by Championship League standards, I guess) player after he impressed in a friendly.