Well, so much for the Fabio Cannavaro experiment. He arrived in the UAE about a year ago to much excitement and acclaim, and with a two-year contract.

But his playing career in the country appears to be over, unless Al Ahli, the Dubai club that recruited him, trades him — which seems quite unlikely, given how much he is getting paid (maybe $6 million a season) … and seeing that the man will be 38 in September, and 38 is ancient, even for central defenders who take care of themselves.

For a player of such renown, Cannavaro’s apparent departure doesn’t really leave much of a void.

The 2006 Fifa Player of the Year, Cannvaro was probably the highest-visibility player to be recruited to UAE domestic soccer. Not the most valuable, but the best-known and most-respected.

The simple truth in the UAE top flight is this: Teams must spend their three foreigner slots on attacking players. The country produces some competent defenders and keepers, but like a lot of places in the world (the U.S., for one) it does not produce scorers.

The teams that finished first and second in the league last year, Al Jazira and Al Shabab, each had two Brazilian forwards. Jazira had an Argentina attacking mid and Shabab had a Chilean playmaker.

Ahli has remade itself in the image of the teams that finished at the top. It has brought in the Brazilian forwards Grafite and Jakson “JaJa” Coelho, and when the club announced the imminent signing of the Chilean international Luis Jimenez, that meant Cannavaro was done because Ahli had exhausted its foreigner slots.

Not that the club has said that, quite. But if the team gets three slots for non-Asian foreigners, and Grafite, JaJa and Jimenez are on board … that’s it.

What did Cannavaro do?

Not much, really.

He stood out, to be sure, on the Ahli back line, a fairly stubby guy with the close-cropped hair. One of the few Europeans playing on a back line in the country. The first time people saw him play, they tended to watch him in a way we don’t normally watch central mids because he was the captain of the Italy team that won the 2006 World Cup and was nearly impossible to score against.

He did not have the same effect at Ahli, who gave up more goals than just about anyone. David O’Leary, the former Leeds and Aston Villa coach, was gifted Cannavaro when he arrived, and within a few months it was clear O’Leary too had figured out he needed foreigners scoring goals, not trying to stop them. But then O’Leary was fired …

In midseason, the president of the Ahli club told me that he thought Cannavaro was doing well, and that the club needed help on defense … but in recent days the same man has been posting exciting tweets about the new attacking players the club has signed.

Cannavaro scored zero goals, but that was no surprise; he rarely scored during his long career in Italy because he is not tall enough to be effective on restarts in front of the goal, and he rarely goes forward in the run of play.

Also, Cannavaro gave very few interviews — didn’t see many smiles like this one while he was on the pitch — and was almost never available in the mixed zone after matches. Thus, his impact as a “star” was significantly muted. He said almost nothing. The club and league did almost nothing to market him; if any “Cannavaro” shirts from the Ahli club were made, I’ve never seen one. He was just the older guy wearing No. 23 for a  team that wasn’t very good.

Ahli finished eighth in a 12-team league, and Cannavaro played only 16 of 22 league matches, in part because he suffered a knee injury.

After his fate had, apparently, been decided, a curious interview turned up on the league website in which he assured everyone he was eager to play out his second season with Ahli. Would have been nice to hear him speak sooner, but it was better than nothing.

He also may have been making clear that Ahli was abandoning him, not vice versa. (And why would he? Who is going to give $6 million to a 38-year-old player?) Presumably, they will have to pay some sort of hefty settlement to Fabio to make him go away.

I’m sure he wishes he could have received two years of however much Al Ahli was paying him … and maybe he will .. but even if he gets a settlement it has to be more money than he can make playing soccer. It seems as if his next stop in soccer will be on the other side of the touch line … as an advisor or even coach. In that interview on the league website, he makes clear he believes he’s learned a lot from some elite coaches in his career. Maybe he gets a job in the second division somewhere …

But he is done here, it certainly seems.

So, Fabio Cannavaro … we in the UAE hardly knew ye.