The Galaxy won the Major League Soccer championship today, and the way this will play around 98 percent of the soccer world is this: David Beckham leaves MLS with another championship. That is how it will be looked at here in the UAE, certainly.

I have two thoughts here. The first is something I’ve already written: Now is the time for a UAE team to pursue David Beckham, who would be perfect here for however long he wants to play. Half a season, maybe?

The second is about Landon Donovan, and what comes next for the best player in U.S. history.

I first spoke with Landon Donovan when he was 16. Another decade, another century, a lifetime ago, it must seem for him as well as for me.

I knew Landon Donovan better than I knew any other elite-level athlete. I use the past tense “knew” because I have been in the UAE for more than three years now, and it’s not like I can drop by at the Home Depot Center to have a post-practice chat with Landon.

For months now, he has been talking about stepping away from the game.

This particular comment after the Galaxy’s 3-1 victory over Houston in MLS Cup final, got special attention. The one about “my gut says to get away for a while.”

From my past dealings with Landon, I believe I understand where this comes from.

Put his career in context: He has been playing soccer practically nonstop since he was 6 and he is now 30. He was part of a really good U.S. team that made the semifinals at the Under 17 World Cup in New Zealand in 1999, and he was awarded a Golden Ball for his play. He signed, at age 17, with the German club Bayer Leverkusen … and it has been soccer, soccer and more soccer pretty much 365 days a year for him ever since.

Included in that are three World Cup appearances, and some monstrous stats with the national team: 134 appearances (second all-time) and 49 goals (15 more than anyone else in U.S. history) …plus 281 MLS regular-season games, 34 playoff games (including five MLS Cup victories, and five Cup goals, both records). And he also spent a couple of months, in three of the past four winters, playing in Europe — with Bayern Munich (2009) and Everton (2010, 2012).

And his games-played, above, does not include club competitions outside the league, which must add up to another 30-40 games. And that could be a low estimate.

Yes, some of the best players on European teams have played more games. But almost none of them has played as many games where he was the best player on his team and had the responsibility of playing to that level.

Landon is tired. He has to be. And he has been dinged up for a couple of years. He also has a failed marriage to a celebrity (who is engaged to someone else), which brought him a different level of attention and another level of stress.

I find interesting the note in one of the linked stories about how he has suggested he wants to do some world travel. Alone.

Landon in many ways is not your typical soccer player, for whom a running theme is “poor as a child, minimal schooling, not very bright, not very curious, soccer a route out of poverty.”

That has not been the meme for American soccer players, who generally have come from suburbia and the middle class, a demographic that is more likely to look for things from life beyond the fast car, the big house and mindless spending. And especially not for Landon, who is a bright guy.

I have met his parents and his stepfather, and they are wonderful people who might be described as a little New Age-y. Interested in feelings and doing right and making a difference. That Landon has kept his nose to this soccer grindstone for more than a decade is fairly amazing.

I hope he takes time off. For the love of God, I hope he doesn’t spend another winter in Europe. He has nothing left to prove over there, and the extra nine or 10 weeks of training have worn him to a nub. He can hang in the Premier League. He showed that at Everton, where he remains extremely popular …

I hope he takes a month and walks the earth. Goes to Katmandu and Timbuktu and Samarkand and anywhere else he finds interesting. (Though he is sick to death of flying.)

He can come visit us in Abu Dhabi. Really. We would show him around. Send him up to Dubai to see the world’s tallest building — though now that I think of it, he was in Dubai with Bayern and found it “plasticky”.

But he could go up to Musandam in Oman, where the beaches are clean, and so is the sea.

He needs to recharge.

I believe he will return. Maybe not right away. But in time to play for the national team in the hexagonal, which begins in early February. (Though he could stand a little more love than he has been getting from Jurgen Klinsmann.)

I believe he wants to play in a fourth World Cup; not many men have done that. I believe he has more to give. But he needs time and space to get back to doing that over the final stretch of a very busy and very demanding career.

I wish him well. If that was his last game, it was a great result.