With great fanfare, Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable network, announced a few months ago that it had the rights to show all English Premier League games in North Africa and the Middle East.

And so they did, in the process adopting the modest slogan as “the world’s greatest sports channel” or somesuch, and with ESPN’s pullout of this side of the Atlantic, who was going to argue?

The Premier League is by some distance the most popular league in the region. More popular than any other foreign league, certainly (a distant second, probably Spain), and in many cases more popular than the local league.

Jazeera was showing every … single … match played by the Premier League, showing as many as five at once on their multiple sports channels. Those of us paying for Jazeera were able to toggle between multiple games, if we so desired.

It was going great … till this past weekend, when Jazeera’s wall-to-wall coverage suddenly sprung a bunch of holes.

What is going on? You’ve come to the right place.

The trouble began on Saturday. The early game. West Ham and Chelsea, went off as scheduled, a 5 p.m. start in the UAE (1 p.m. in England).

Then came the 7 p.m. games — 3 in England — which is when most games are played. And all Jazeera had to show was Arsenal-Southampton.

Not on: Stoke-Sunderland, Newcastle-Norwich, Hull City-Crystal Palace, Fulham-Swansea City.

And then at 9 p.m., here, the one late game, Everton-Liverpool, came on.

You would think no one pays much attention to Stoke and Sunderland, and you would be wrong.

The complaints were immediate and noisy, here in the UAE.

Jazeera blamed it on the Premier League, which seemed hard to believe, considering Jazeera paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights fee.

Turns out, it was the Premier League, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Premier League cut those four feeds because, it said, Jazeera was allowing access to Premier League games outside the contracted regions — by not keeping tabs on the subscriptions being sold.

Games that were supposed to be blacked out in England were showing up on bandit satellite feeds — or even streaming video. And the Premier League said Jazeera is the source of the leaks.

Subscribers in the UAE are ticked off, because they believed they have been paying for all the games, as Jazeera promised.

Jazeera must be ticked off because the Premier League seems to be in abrogation of the contract.

And the Premier League doesn’t like its product being stolen.

I foresee lawsuits.

And a lot of unhappy Premier League fans.