Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever done a one-on-one interview with a soccer player who was not a member of the U.S. national team.

What American journalists don’t entirely understand is the high degree of access we have to professional athletes in the U.S. and Canada — especially by comparison to nearly anywhere else in the world.

Kobe Bryant may not give you a one-on-one, buy you have a shot at him (and nearly every other NBA guy) nearly every day of the season, after practices and after games. Baseball players can be approached during spring training, or before games. Hockey guys are available all the time because they’re generally Canadian and friendly. NFL guys? You can make a run at any of them after practice or after the game.

And U.S. soccer guys are famously available because the sport is still scrabbling for a foothold in the U.S. The players are very media friendly, generally.

Not so in the rest of the world, where soccer players aren’t required to be available and rarely are. There may be writers covering Manchester United who have never been alone with Wayne Rooney. And in England, some players sign with specific newspapers for talking; everyone else is shut out.

It’s difficult even here, in the UAE. If players don’t want to talk, they don’t, and no one is going to force them to. Often, the club doesn’t want you talking to them, anyway. And, more, English is a second language to every player in the league. If they speak it at all.

So, it was a bit of a coup for me to get 45 minutes today with one of the Al Jazira guys, a Brazilian who is the team’s No. 2 scorer.

I will do 800-plus words on him for the Thursday editions of The National, but here are the basics on him.

His given name is Jader Volnei Spindler, but like many Brazilians he goes by a nickname. In his case, Bare. Pronounced  bar-EH. He seemed unaware of the meaning of “bare” in English. Which is understandable, considering he seems to have taught himself how to speak English during his two-plus years in the UAE.

He comes from the small city of Venancio Aires in the far south of Brazil, an area he said is populated by the descendants of German and Italian immigrants. His own family, he said is 100 percent of German origin. Though he speaks no German.

He is a rarity among Brazilian forwards because he is what we in the States would call a “target” forward. A big guy (6-2, maybe 190) who can get in front of goal and hold off defenders trying to shove him out of position. It requires size and strength, and Brazil generally prefers fast and highly technical forwards/strikers who often are small. Think Robinho or Neymar. Bare has decent speed, but he is no technical whiz.

His father died when he was seven months old, and he grew up in modest circumstances; his mother worked at a supermarket, and he joined her there when he was 12. He got his nickname from his preference for a cheap brand of a guarana-based soft drink, Bare. Because he didn’t have a lot of money, other kids started calling him by the brand name of the drink he carried around.

At the age of 19, he decided he wanted to be a professional football player. He had played for the youth teams in Guarani and Gremio, but he didn’t like his odds of emerging from the deep ranks of Brazilians footballers.

So, in 2001, at the age of 19 he left for Japan, which he knew “nothing about. Not one thing.” He had no idea how far it was, and he didn’t speak Japanese. It was just him. He began with a second-division team, and in 2007 and 2008 he was with one of Japan’s top teams, Gamba Osaka, and was named to the J-League Best Eleven in 2007 after scoring 20 league goals.

From there, he was recruited to the UAE to play for Al Ahli, which is in Dubai, and apparently paid a 1 billion yen transfer fee (about $12 million). The club won the league championship his first season but melted down in the second, and when a new coaching staff came in from England (David O’Leary, etc.) and the club decided to go with Emirati strikers, he was a free agent who needed a club.

It worked out well for him. He signed for three season with Al Jazira, which is coached by a Brazilian, Abel Braga, and Jazira is now on the cusp of winning the league for the first time and will play in the final of the President’s Cup on April 11. Jazira has never won the President’s Cup, either.

Bare is married to a Brazilian he met in Dubai, and they are expecting their first child in two months. He wants to go home to Brazil to live, someday, specifically his home state of Rio Grande de Sul, but he wants to continue to play overseas, where the money is better and jobs more plentiful.

He seems like a sincere guy, and I know he works hard from watching him play. He started badly with Jazira, with zero goals in his first seven league matches, but he has nine in the past seven, and he has 13 goals in all competitions, which isn’t bad.

And he speaks English. That’s key. I didn’t have to work through an interpreter. It was just me and Bare, sitting in the dugout on the pitch before practice.

I will link to the story when it appears in print.

So, that’s one one-on-one with a non-Yank. It went well. I will see if I can replicate the experience.