I am a fan of the Arabian Gulf League. This is soccer. The top division of the domestic league.

It may not be La Liga or the Premier League, but it’s what we have, here in the UAE.

It’s indigenous. It’s hometown. And your local club is just down the street from where you live, in most UAE neighborhoods. (We tend to cluster in about four cities, all of which have AGL teams.)

The AGL features all the best players from the UAE, and about 50 or 60 of them are pretty good, and 50-some foreign professionals wooed and paid well by the local clubs to give them a chance to win a championship.

We take the league very seriously, at The National. The AGL is by far the most professional and most significant local sports organization, and we react to it accordingly. (Check our mega-preview package, put up online for your viewing pleasure.)

But I must concede … that this is a league that can be difficult to commit to, particularly in August, when games are played in “feels like” temperatures well into triple digits — as was the case the other night when I saw Al Jazira, The Pride of Abu Dhabi (as they would like to be known), play host to Al Wasl of Dubai about one mile from the offices of The National, and I was sweating profusely without moving a muscle.

A freelancer who contributes to the sports section here, an Emirati, a citizen of the UAE, as opposed to the 85-90 percent who are not, recently wrote a comment piece calling on the league to pursue expatriate fans as a way to improve attendance in the league, which generally sits between 500 and a few thousand, which sometimes depresses expat players. The small crowds.

Our freelancer had several good ideas. Several of them pertaining to marketing the league through the tourist councils in each of the emirates. It has been known to happen that the tourist councils will get involved in promoting a match between visiting European teams, in December or January, but does nothing to attempt to get fans to the matches of the local league.

I can vouch for this: A significant fraction of all traveling soccer fans, particularly those who are proud of their fandom, make a point of seeing the domestic league, if it is playing, whenever they travel. (When I was in Cyprus last year, I really wanted to see some local soccer; we missed one of the Limassol teams playing by one day. Darn!)

All those Brits and French and Germans and Russians who cycle through the UAE, particularly in the winter … you could get them to drop by a stadium to see what the local league is about. All you need to do is tell them how to get there and when the teams are playing. Easy.

But maybe not in August. Or in May. The start and finish of the domestic league, when the weather is just brutal.

I parked about a quarter-mile from Jazira’s home ground, Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium, and hiked in.

It was brutally hot, and it often seems to get worse just after the sun goes down, when humidity surges, and kickoff was at 8:40. Still hot from the day, very “close” because of the water in the air.

As noted, when it gets like that here, most people don’t go outside. Walking in it feels like you are running some risk with your body.

Sitting in it isn’t a lot better.

I got to the game in the 10th minute, and walked in without a ticket, without paying, which is how we roll here (admission is charged almost never), and sat down in a surprisingly crowded lower level, about 10 rows of seats, between midfield and the north end of the western grandstand.

The only holdup for getting into the stadium was getting patted down by the local police. Which can be semi-silly, which I think was going through the mind of the cop when he made sure I wasn’t carrying anything dangerous. Like, what are the odds … a Western guy, not young, likely to get in a fight, or something? He smiled as if to say, “Sure, it’s silly, but it’s the rules.”

And I had no problem with it.

Inside were fathers and sons, teenagers in three or four-guy groups. And some generic fans — though I didn’t see another person in Western-style clothes anywhere near me. Nor did I see anyone in Subcontinent-style clothes, either.

Jazira was rolling out its revamped team, led by Abel Braga, a Brazilian who was coach when they won their one and only championship, in 2011. And some new expats: the erratic but colorful Jefferson Farfan, a winger from Peru; Thiago Neves, a Brazilian attacking midfielder who has played in Saudi Arabia; and one holdover expat, Mirko Vucinic, a big target-man forward from Montenegro, a serious player, previously of Juventus. Yes, that Juventus. Vucinic scored 25 league goals last season.

So, I settled in, as best I could.

Many of the Emiratis, who attend the games in the white robes known as kanduras, tend to wipe down a seat before they sit because this time of year, especially, anything not indoors gets covered in a fine layer of dirt almost immediately, and nothing messes up a kandura like sitting in dust.

The game was interesting. Jazira’s new foreigners, and most of their old local guys, against the Wasl version. Who would prevail?

Did I mention it was hot? It always would be a factor.

Two things about playing in that sort of heat:

1. You do not want to fall behind, because it is far easier to sit back and defend. Not as much running.

2. And you certainly don’t want to have a guy sent off, because that means even more running — in a climate where the normal person loses about 90 percent of his electrolytes in 25 minutes of vigorous activity — and the game lasts 90 minutes.

Both problems befell Jazira. They gave up a goal on a restart in the first 20 minutes, a kick that went right through the defensive wall because, as is the case the world ’round, many guys in the wall really don’t want to get hit by the ball, and the Jazira guys actively got out of the way, and the ball sailed between them and into the unprotected half of the goal.

Then, about five minutes later, Jazira’s right back made a particularly awful decision to go after a ball that was going to mean a violent meeting with a Wasl guy going for the ball from the other direction.

Jazira guy red-carded.

The crowd sighed but didn’t complain. It was too hot to complain, and the Jazira guy clearly was at at fault.

Jazira got even before half, but Wasl scored early in the second half on a deflection, and it ended 2-1.

So, sitting in the heat. I was wearing very thin cargo pants, and a golf shirt. No sleeves. I was wearing a baseball cap, when it didn’t make my head too hot.

And I sweated as I sat. As did the guys around me. The guys wearing the outfit supposedly best for high temperatures were mopping their brows.

At halftime, a fairly significant chunk of the crowd got up … and didn’t come back. Maybe a third?

But that left a still decent-size crowd, and they were still there when I left in the 85th minute — doing a very Los Angeles thing, leaving so I wouldn’t get caught in traffic.

I was dripping by the time I got to the car, and I showered the moment I got home. It was one of those “so hot I am tearing off my clothes and leaving them where they fall” situations.

But I had supported the local league and the neighborhood team, Jazira, by attending, and it was fun watching the fans, especially the fathers and sons, reacting to the game.

The game was good — quite good, considering the weather. Allowing me to do something truly local — go the neighborhood stadium, sit among hundreds of local men and boys (as perhaps the oldest guy in the stadium not sitting in the press box), and sweat like a local in the brutal heat of August. It made me feel vaguely virtuous.