Not something that happens every day in world football. The government has a meeting and a minister decides to dissolve the domestic professional league. Bang. Gone.

It is one of those “what did you say?” moments. When you hear something so completely unexpected, your brain doesn’t grasp it right off. Or refuses to.

That moment for me was late this morning when my colleague, Ahmed Rizvi, called in with word of what was going on. “They did what?” … “So, the league is gone?” … “Who did this, again?” … “And it’s done? Finished?” … “What happens next?” … “Well, sheesh, we better get a move on.”

From that moment until the paper went to bed, we put in about 30 man hours on the story and made dozens of calls, and mostly found league and club officials in a state of shock and not ready to go on the record.

Here is the Day 1 news story I did for The National.

So, why did this happen?

The official explanation is that the UAE Football League, as the Pro League preferred to call itself, had its license revoked by the General Authority for Youth and Sport Welfare because it persisted in operating under an incorrect name.

(The league thought their name was catchier, plus it had the country in the title … and apparently didn’t think it could go out of business on the basis of this.)

The league’s real name, according to the GAYSW was “the League of Pro Football Clubs,” and by refusing to use the name in all of its official functions, despite warnings, the government had the right to put the league out of business and did, giving all of its authority to the Football Association — the national body that previously had run the country’s lower-division clubs and its national teams.

What this really was about, in my opinion, was the FA being ticked off at the hotshots running the league, and to eliminate the chairman of the league they just eliminated the league.

Of course, it led to more questions than we could pose or answer, about “are players and coaches still under contract” and “will the league start on schedule”, etc., etc.

Not all of those could be answered today, and the words we heard a lot from the ex-league and the clubs were “shock” and “chaos” and “confusion.”

Anyway, it seemed a very abrupt and very final action to take against a league that had been up and running for three years, a league that in the past 12 months has brought in Diego Maradona and Fabio Cannavaro and probably is better-known than ever … and control of it given to the fusty old FA, which is not quite competent, from what I have seen in dealing with it.

A very weird story, and we will have to see how this sorts out, and if it turns out to have been a disastrous day in the history of UAE soccer.