Al Jazira is an Abu Dhabi club that has been pretty good for most of a decade but hasn’t been particularly good at sealing deals at the end of the UAE soccer season. In 40 years, the club has one league title (2011), two President Cup championships (2011, 2012) and one Arabian Gulf Cup (2010). […]

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It often turns out this way, in the news biz. Weeks of making something out of nothing. And then a stretch of time where you have big events colliding on the calendar. This is one of those “colliding big events” weeks, here in the UAE. Four events that pretty safely fall into our top 10 […]

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It is abundantly clear on which days the UAE domestic soccer league should play. Thursday night and Friday night. Yet, over the first nine weeks of the current season, only once did the league actually plan for a Thursday-Friday schedule. Which is crazy, and here is why.

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These words came out of my mouth tonight: “Mahmoud Khamis is with Nasr! That’s where he went!” Which is revealing, in this sense: I know way too much about the Arabian Gulf League, which began play in the 2014-15 season tonight. Good times!

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We have reached a point in sports history … and perhaps it is a compliment, although of a back-handed sort … that any time an aging or semi-flaky player is thought to be on the move … he invariably is linked to a club in the UAE. Earlier, it was Jorge Valdivia, Chilean midfielder. Now, […]

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A week ago, I did a post about the unlikely pairing of the Chilean international playmaker Jorge Valdivia with the little Arabian Gulf League club Fujairah FC. Which was a sensation, in the small world of UAE soccer. At that moment in history, we were led to believe the deal was done. When it was […]

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One of the surest ways to move your soccer career forward is to do a little something with a successful team at the World Cup. Like the one that ended on Sunday. —Luis Suarez scored two goals against England, bit a guy, and got a huge deal to more from Liverpool to Barcelona. —Toni Kroos […]

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The United Arab Emirates didn’t come within a country mile of qualifying for Brazil 2014. For practical purposes, the UAE’s qualifying run in the Asian Football Confederation ended in late 2011, back when I was covering the team for The National. A home loss to Kuwait and then a road loss to Lebanon, which is […]

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I’m trying to figure out how this happened. How Al Ahli of Dubai went from being one of the better teams in the UAE soccer league to being the unrivaled best team in the country. And, like many takeovers, it was incremental. I saw Ahli play last night, against Al Jazira, just down the street […]

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The most genuine of UAE sports events is a domestic football match. Perhaps the national team is a bigger deal than the upper-tier clubs … but not always. Especially when it is a leading rivalry, like Al Jazira home to Al Wahda, Abu Dhabi rivals whose stadiums are about three miles apart. When opportunities like […]

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