Diego Maradona spent the day in Dubai, just up the road from us in Abu Dhabi, and how can we describe the reaction?

How about “over the top”?

El Diego, El Jefe Loco, had them eating out of his pudgy hand at a press conference, on Dubai’s Palm Jumeira  — one of the ritziest hotels in the ritziest of neighborhoods in a wealthy country.

He and Al Wasl, the local professional club that has hired him as its coach, staged a press conference today, and everyone was there.

Well, aside from me. I thought about catching a ride up to Dubai, but it was a day off for me, and it was supposed to be televised … and I decided to sit this one out. I’ve got two years to catch up to him. Well, in theory.

It wasn’t as if I was missed. Something like 100 media members from around the world were there — though the overwhelming majority were UAE-based media.

Here is the basic news story that is appearing in The National — along with some video of Diego speaking (Spanish, of course, with English subtitles).

We did a sidebar on how much money Wasl is paying Maradona. He scoffed at one number floating around, which was $8 million a year, saying that’s the kind of money players get, not coaches. For the moment, the speculation seems to have landed (for no apparent reason) at about $2.5 million per year, which is a lot of money for a guy with almost zero club coaching experience and who was unemployed a couple of weeks ago, but in the high-middle range of UAE coaches.

By comparison, Abel Braga, the Brazilian who just won the league and cup double with Al Jazira, was thought to be getting $3.6 million a year, but he had won the 2006 Club World Cup with Internacional of Brazil, beating Barcelona in the final, and had decades of coaching experience.

The gist of what El Diego said? He went off on Fifa and Sepp Blatter and, it seems fair to say, Julio Grondona, the 79-year-old president of the Argentine Football Association, calling them “dinosaurs” … which no one will argue with.

But it might leave Wasl and local fans a little worried that, even while sitting in a theater in Dubai, Maradona is still fighting fights back in Argentina. He needs to put that behind him for a while. You’re not in Buenos Aires anymore, Diego.

As regards Wasl, he said he thought the club needs a midfielder, and it does, which shows he has, in fact, watched some video. He said he wanted a young and fit team, and was not interested in older guys — perhaps a reference to another Dubai club, Al Ahli, paying scads of money to 37-year-old Fabio Cannavaro. And maybe even to Francisco Yeste, a Spaniard who was by far Wasl’s best player this season but is, sadly, 31.

Maradona indicated that he had some ideas about whom he would like Wasl to pursue, in the context of a rule that limits UAE clubs to three foreigners and one Asian foreigner. He said, as if we needed to know, that he would not be bringing Lionel Messi or Carlos Tevez with him.

Chuck Culpepper, our columnist, did a piece on how it all was a little mind-boggling, Maradona in Dubai, and noted that the UAE is a country that does tend to say, “Well, why not?” when it comes to big ideas. That is an attitude that develops, it would seem,  when your whole country is floating on oil.

Know this about Maradona. Like all big-name expatriate football talents, he will be well provided for very nicely. The club probably will pay for his housing, where he and his ex-wife (who usually is with him, even though they are divorced) and maybe even some of his Argentine assistant coach posse will live. He will get a driver, and various domestic servants … and it will be very cushy. He already has described Dubai as a “paradise.”

All that he will be asked to do is make Wasl a championship contender, and the club wasn’t all that far off this year … be willing to be marketed as a face and name to help broaden the Dubai/UAE/Wasl football brand … and be dependable, which may be the hard part.

His first official act in the UAE was the press conference, and it began 80 minutes late. Which is something a star player might be able to get away with, but you don’t want your coach blowing an appointment by nearly an hour and a half.

So, we will see. Ahli before this season hired Cannavaro and brought in David O’Leary, a guy who once got Leeds United to the semi-finals of the Champions League, and that blew up. Cannavaro did about what you would expect a 37-year-old man would do in central defense, which is to say “not much” … and O’Leary was fired almost two months ago,  eight months into what he said ought to be a three-year plan, after complaining of having to deal with Emirati players. Something Maradona may have issues with as well, but perhaps not quite to the same extent, given that even 20-year-old Emiratis know who he is.

The next big batch of Maradona news probably will come out of the training camp the club will have in August, presumably somewhere in Europe.

He is scheduled to watch Wasl’s last game of the 2010-11 season tomorrow night, and may sign autographs for star-struck fans.  We will have two reporters there. So it begins.