I love the President’s Cup final.

It’s a major domestic soccer game, the local version of England’s FA Cup final. But what I really find fascinating is how big this is with the Emirati populace.

This attracts regular guys in big numbers, but it also attracts many of the most prominent sheikhs in the country — in this case, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, UAE vice president and the ruler of Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi; and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, the deputy prime minister and owner of the Manchester City soccer club, and others.

It is the one sports event at which so many royals are likely to attend, and where regular citizens turn out. In part, I am convinced, because they like hanging out with the “big” sheikhs.

I have seen two of these now, and in each case more than 38,000 people — nearly all of them Emirati males — turned out for the game at the Zayed Sports City Stadium.

Those are big numbers in a country with so many expats in it that you wonder if the country has 38,000 Emiratis in it. Total. When Emiratis sometimes seem like mythological creatures not seen in real life.

Two perspectives of the final.

For the Monday a.m. newspaper, I wrote a commentary in which I declared the President’s Cup final to be the biggest day in UAE sports.

The country has the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix (Formula One racing) and the Dubai World Cup (horse racing), global events, both of them. But I believe both of those events interest expatriates more than Emiratis.

The nub of the argument: That the President’s Cup represents a special day each year in which rulers and ruled get together and just revel in whatever it is that makes them Emiratis, and not Saudis or Qataris or Yemenis …

I never feel more like an expatriate than when covering that game. Almost like an inadvertent voyeur, watching someone else’s family moment break out before my eyes.

As for the game, Al Jazira, which I suppose is my preferred UAE team (their stadium is about 500 yards from where I’m sitting), defeated a feisty Baniyas club 3-1.

I wrote what we, in British journalism lingo, call the match report, and my colleagues Chuck Culpepper and Amith Passela (covering his 21st consecutive President’s Cup final, by the way) provided commentary and sidebars here, here and here. We at The National swarmed that match, like the good old days of deadline print journalism, and it was fun.

Plus, tweeting (when I could get an internet connection), and a quick match report for the web …

The dynamics inside the stadium were interesting. Baniyas tends not to draw many people to league games, but for the Big Match it seemed as if entire neighborhoods in the suburbs must have emptied out — because they had more than half of the fans and were far more vocal than Jazira supporters.

(That might have been because Jazira won this thing a year ago, and Baniyas last won it in 1992.)

So, if you want to go to one event that feels like an Emirati family reunion?

Gotta be the President’s Cup final.