I was aware of this, a bit. I clearly remember, X number of years ago (during that short period when the proudly clueless Dutchman Ruud Gullit was coaching the Galaxy), having this pointed out to me.

Gullit was talking to a few of us after a practice session, and he just launched into a Jeremiad about statistics, and how soccer/football can’t be quantified statistically, and how Americans always wanted to try to do so, but it wasn’t a game that lent itself to it.

Not like baseball, American football, etc., he said.

Having covered 11 Olympics outside the U.S., and three World Cups (outside the U.S.), and having spent most of the past three years outside the U.S., I can say this with some degree of certainty:

No one puts out a box score like the Yanks do.

When I got my hands on a real, full-blown, no-stat-left-unchecked box a couple of times this week … it almost brought tears of joy to my eyes.

The UAE, let me note, is just now discovering statkeeping for its national soccer league and its national soccer team.

The league just last season began electronically posting boxes from the Pro League — which means we now have only about 35 totally undocumented years. To my knowledge, the UAE Football Association still does not keep statistics for the national team. If you call up the FA and ask for a list of the top-10 cap-winners in UAE history … they have no idea. Equally unsure about their all-time scorers.

Most countries have a bit more of an idea than that, but take the UAE as an example of a common notion in the world — that beyond the barest outlines of who won or who lost a big game, statistics are considered pointless.

This is true in much of the soccer world, though. Much of the planet pays no heed to “assists” — which American soccer has been following for decades. Or goalkeeper saves.

What they consider a veritable spread sheet of information is … starting lineup, jersey numbers, minutes played, substitutions, red and yellow cards, goals scored. Really. That’s it, often.

English soccer, for all the money sunk into it, is hardly any better, though some movement has been detected. A coach often regarded as a hulking Neanderthal, “Big” Sam Allardyce, is one of those who has been on the cutting edge of it, and Arsene Wenger of Arsenal apparently is there, too, as this London Times story on soccer stats notes.

Earlier this year, at the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, a workshop was given over to advanced stats in sports, as noted here.

Some areas where soccer is moving with advanced analytics include passes completed, passes completed forward and passes completed backward. It can be revealing, apparently, that the guy who completes 80 percent of his passes does it because he’s nearly always passing backwards, when the idea is to get forward.

Still, much of the sports world would describe the American fascination with statistics as queer and perhaps wrongheaded. They might wander off into a discussion of American fascination with business schools …

Which brings me to this week. The UAE national basketball team has been playing in the Fiba Asia Championship in China, and the winner is guaranteed a berth in the London 2012 Olympics. So, a big deal.

Anyway, Fiba Asia, probably heavily influenced by the NBA, is producing full-blown box scores! Yes! So I didn’t actually have to watch entire games to have a very good idea of what happened.

(I took the sheet over to one of my British colleagues and asked him if any sport in the UK would put out a sheet of numbers like that, and he said, no, but it was “very American, isn’t it?” And not in a complimentary way.

I printed out one of these boxes today, and that’s when I got a little emotional. On one piece of paper I had … minutes played, field goals (made and attempted) two-pointers (made and attempted),  three-pointers (M&A) free throws (M&A), rebounds (offensive, defensive, total), assists, turnovers, steals, blocks, fouls, fouls drawn, points. Score by five-minute increments, points from turnovers, points in the paint, second-chance points, fast-break points …

It was one dense mass of numbers. Just like back home!

I held it like it was a bit of sacred scripture, and when I had punched out a “brief” on the UAE’s narrow victory over Malaysia, I took the box to the other two Americans in the sports department … and their faces lit up when I handed it to them and said, “remind you of home?”

As one of them said, “And the thing is, back home you’d have this sheet about 30 seconds after the game!” We both sighed.

So, box scores. They would seem critical to any team sport, Americans would say. And the rest of the world wouldn’t even notice.