If you think American sports franchises are quick on the trigger, when it comes to firing coaches … you have not been paying attention to sports clubs overseas.

The owner of the Chelsea soccer club fires a world-famous coach about once every six months. Once you get past Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and David Moyes, every coach in the English Premier League ought to rent, not buy.

Here in the UAE, maybe one or two coaches will make it through a whole season — the coach of the championship team, and the coach of a team perceived to have overachieved. Every one else … swapped out. Sometimes, the second guy is canned, too.

Al Jazira, one of the more prominent UAE clubs, did something bizarre over the weekend. Not that firing a coach is odd, it was the circumstances of it.

Jazira had just polished off Al Dhafra, 4-1, to close to within six points of Pro League-leaders Al Ain, when Paulo Bonamigo, the Brazilian the team hired as coach in the summer, found out at a press conference that he had been fired. (No, not classy.)

This is how one of our reporters described it: “With the game almost ending, the news leaked out that Bonamigo had been replaced by Luis Milla. The club later circulated an official release stating that Bonamigo had been sacked and Milla named as the new coach. When Bonamigo was asked at the presser, he said: ‘This is news to me. I have not been told until now. I have to find out my status with the club management when I get back from the press event.'”

That is the last we heard from Bonamigo.

Two days later, Milla made an appearance at a press conference and talked about his “new challenge”.

If this were the offseason, this would not seem strange. Milla, a 46-year-old Spaniard, apparently is a guy with promise, as a coach. He played at Barcelona, and coached age-group teams for Spain, including the 2012 Olympic team that did not escape the group stage, at London. Spaniards who played for Barcelona … they have cachet, at the moment.

What is strange is that Milla was parachuted into Abu Dhabi at a critical phase of the Jazira season.

He was in the stands for the 4-1 game, and perhaps met the players after … all of four days before a Asian Champions League opener in Iran and nine days before a win-or-else match at Al Ain.

The results are in from Milla’s first match: Tractor Sazi of Iran 3, Jazira 1. Already in a hole in the Champions League.

If the club traveled back to Abu Dhabi tonight from the northwest corner of Iran, that means Milla will have four days to get ready for Al Ain, and really more like two, given that the first team will not practice hard tomorrow and no one will go hard on Saturday, the day before the match.

The main issue here is … what was the rush? Jazira never looked quite right this season, falling out of the President’s Cup in the quarterfinals and losing to a few teams they should not have, but most people who watch the team would suggest management has stuck way too long with a midfield “led” by two guys far past their primes, Ibrahim Diaky and Subait Khater.

Bonamigo had been dealing with the issue for months, and had done about as well as could be hoped. No, he is not a dynamic guy, and he never played for Barcelona. But he at least knew the players’ names.

Those are the kind of moves we make over here. Bizarre moves. Dumping a guy getting decent results, replacing him with a guy stuck in a very difficult situation — when giving him a summer to train a team would be far better.

Just hard to fathom.