We get visitors, here in the UAE, this time of year. Many of them are Europeans who show up with soggy clothes and dripping noses, beaten down by months of short days and foul winter weather, seeking some sun and dry land before they lose their minds.

That is how, this week, the UAE becomes the temporary home for 30 percent of the English Premier League.

Yes. Six of the 20 teams in perhaps the elite soccer league on the planet will be knocking around in this corner of the Arabian Peninsula at some point this week, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

The roster:

Norwich City, Queens Park Rangers, Reading, Swansea City, Sunderland, West Ham United.

By Wednesday, all of them will be here.

OK, so it isn’t the elite of the league. Those six provide us with half the lower division of the Premier League table, at the moment, including two teams currently in the relegation zone … and Swansea City, Michael Laudrup‘s upwardly mobile team, seventh in the standings and about to play for the league cup.

But a Premier League team is a Premier League team, and each of them gets some huge amount of TV money just for being in the league, providing them with the ability to make some truly horrific mistakes in overpaying footballers who are done or about to be. (See: Current squad, Queens Park Rangers.)

We get a sprinkling of teams from the mainland of Europe around the new year, teams from Germany and even colder locales further east (hello, Anzhi Makhachkala), where leagues tend to take off a week or three in that holiday period … but now it’s entirely the Premier League.

It is a function of the schedule. First, the Premier League plays right through what the Brits like to call “the festive season”. I mean, what can be more fun than sitting in a freezing rain on Boxing Day watching your team slide around a water-logged pitch?

Several of the league’s teams make up for that grueling run with this interlude. This is a Champions League week, with an FA Cup weekend ahead, and no league games on the docket, and teams in the lower half of the Premier League have no games to play and plenty of things to fix. So they get on a plane and make the eight-hour ride down here.

What do they do? They mostly ignore the local media (they do that at home, too, of course), they run around a bit, stretch, find a field that isn’t a patch of churned-up goo, lay around the pool at some five-star hotel and maybe see if they can apply some salve on shattered team spirit by bonding over a couple of rounds of golf.

The idea is that by the end of their four-, five- or six-day seaside tour, they are refreshed and reinvigorated and, in theory, prepared to face up to another couple of months of soccer in the liquid sunshine of Old Blighty.