I have been thinking about this for some time now. A sort of nightmare soccer scenario.

The UAE national team over the past year has played as well as it has at any time in the country’s history.

Which may count for nothing on the World Cup stage — a potentially crushing disappointment I wrote about today in The National.

On Friday last, the UAE clinched a spot in the 2015 Asian Cup, in Australia, and did it in the quickest possible amount of time — by winning all four games they have played in the group stage.

What has been a bit jarring about this is … that the last 11 teams to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil are being determined right this minute, too.

Qualifying for the Asian Cup is good. It is a significant, continental competition.

But it is nothing like the World Cup, in which the UAE has played only once, in 1990.

These are good times for UAE football. The Emiratis have an 18-match unbeaten streak over the past 15 months, and in less than two years have climbed from No 138 in the world to No 71.

Just ahead of them in the rankings (at least for a few more days) is Jordan — which was nuked 5-0 last week by Uruguay in the first half of a World Cup intercontinental playoff. (Mexico is routing New Zealand in the other playoff.)

And Jordan, at this moment, is not remotely as good as the UAE.

However, when the UAE needed to be good, if it were to go to Brazil, was back in the fall of 2011, when the third round of Asia qualifying for Brazil began.

I was covering the team back then, and I saw the UAE lose 3-2 to Kuwait, and 3-1 to Lebanon in Beirut, and that was pretty much that — though the Emiratis were not formally eliminated until two more games.

So, yes, in 2011 the UAE already was looking at 2018, in terms of the World Cup.

Where this went wrong was the Football Association’s failure to bring in the young guys who had been making lots of noise in age-group competition for two or three years previous to September of 2011.

Now, those guys are pretty much the UAE team. Two years too late. And looking back at who was in the first XI, in September of 2011, is fairly appalling.

The UAE’s next big qualifying push is for the Russia 2018 World Cup, and the potential problem there is that the guys who are 23 and 24 now … will be 27 and 28 when the final bit of 2018 qualifying is concluded.

Too young for 2014, perhaps too old for 2018, at a time when soccer players seem to flame out earlier than ever, especially attacking players.

And it is not as if the age-group teams behind the guys who played in the 2012 London Olympics are doing much of anything.  The U23 team preparing for the 2016 Olympics is packed with unknowns, and the U17s just went out immediately in their World Cup, held here in the UAE.

The UAE could be really good for about three years … and it could not get them anywhere near the World Cup.