This is a topic that comes up fairly often, in this part of the planet, sometimes referred to as the Mena (Middle East/North Africa) region:

Who is the Arab world’s greatest footballer?

At the moment, a case often is made, by pundits, for an Egyptian striker named Mohamed Aboutrika, who today made his debut in the UAE’s top flight and scored a goal for Baniyas in a President’s Cup game.

Nice goal, too. For 67 minutes the new kid — well, he’s 34, actually — had seemed nearly invisible. Baniyas is in its third season of focusing almost all of its energy in lobbing the ball forward towards their 6-foot-2 forward Andre Senghor, and that habit apparently will die hard.

Aboutrika, however, is more mobile than Senghor, and moves around, and in the 68th minute the ball came to him just outside the box, and he wound up and blistered it into the upper-left corner of the net, the sort of goal that leaves onlookers saying, “Wow.”

It also lends instant credence to those who make the case that Aboutrika, even at age 34, is the Arab world’s greatest footballer.

We at The National have been all over the Aboutrika story from the beginning. Before his first match, one of our English correspondents who pays attention to the African game did a piece about how Aboutrika is enormously popular in Egypt because he is seen as a regular guy, a man of the people, maybe even a deep thinker.

He is in the UAE only because the soccer league in Egypt has been shut down for more than a year because of the Port Said disaster, in which 72 fans of the Cairo club Al Ahly — for which Aboutrika played — were killed. As a tribute, his jersey number with Baniyas is “72”.

His first match with Baniyas — which was played, in Dubai, at 5:20 p.m., before most people are off work — brought out dozens of Egyptians who cared only about the player, not for either team.

Unfortunately, his goal was not enough to make for a winning debut, because Baniyas happened to be pitted against Al Ain, the best club in the club. It finished 2-1, and now Al Ain is in the semis.

As the above story notes, Aboutrika is playing outside of Egypt only because his home club, Al Ahly, needed the cash Baniyas sent their way in exchange for a half-season loan.

We will see in the coming weeks if he really does still look like the world’s greatest Arab footballer. Some would make the case for Omar Abdulrahman, the little midfielder with Al Ain.

It was then, perhaps a moment of great symbolism when Aboutrika exchanged his Baniyas jersey, after the match, for the Al Ain shirt worn by Abdulrahman.