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.

The Arabian Gulf League is a fairly big deal. Fourteen teams, representing six of the seven United Arab Emirates, spread out from Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah in the north to Madinat Zayed in the south and west.

They pay real money for real players. Lots of guys here are making north of $1 million a year.

But the league has scads of competition in the soccer marketplace.

Nearly every Emirati has a local team he would like to see do well.

But he also is very likely to have a preferred international club team, too, which he may follow on some expensive subscription plan.

And those other leagues, in England and Spain and Italy and Germany and France, spread their league games around.

Italy prefers to play on Sunday, but everyone else has several games on both Saturday and Sunday. England often has one Monday game, and Spain of France have the occasional Friday game.

Then we get to league cups and European club games, the Champions Legaue and the Europa League.

League cups tend to be contested on Tuesday and Wednesday. As does the Champions League, the NFL in this scneario — that is, the Champions League pretty much crushes all competition, when it going on.

The Europa League (a second-tier Champions League) plays on Thursdays. But no one else does.

Thus, the Arabian Gulf League, if it wants to avoid clashing with major European club soccer, should play its games on Thursday and Friday. National leagues rarely play on either day, and neither does the Champions League.

Thursday and Friday are out there for the AGL to sit on, and almost inevitably pick up several thousand viewers from the guys sitting in coffee shops and preferring soccer on the big-screen TV to … anything else.

Yet …

Yet, these are the days the 14-team league will play on through the first nine rounds of games: Monday-Tuesday … Saturday-Sunday (the worst of all choices) … Thursday-Friday (hey, how did that happen?) … Monday-Tuesday … Sunday (all seven games) … Friday-Saturday … Wednesday-Thursday …Monday-Tuesday … Saturday-Sunday (did we mention this is a terrible idea?).

OK, you say, “Why do they do it like that?”

For one reason: The UAE national team.

I like to think the league would, in fact, play Thursday and Friday every week.

But whenever the UAE national team is about to play, the AGL shifts to (nearly meaningless) league cup competition. Because if you take away the 23 national team players from domestic clubs, it shifts the balance of power.

The UAE has a pretty good team, but the talent is not deep — which is perhaps no surprise in a country with only 1 million citizens.

And if the most prominent clubs, Al Ahli or Al Ain or Al Jazira, have to play league games without their Emirati stars, they will be in real trouble of losing to lesser teams — many of whom have zero guys in the national team. (This actually might be good for competition, in the league.)

This year, the AGL has a 12-day break in the league next month so that the national team can have a few days together and then play two friendlies, with Australia and Uzbekistan.

After the games of October 27-28, the league then shuts down for 30 days — so the national team can train for a bit and then play in the Gulf Cup of Nations — which the UAE won, last time around, to much local acclaim.

And they will shut down the league again in January, so that the UAE can go play in the Asian Cup, the big quadrennial continental competition, which is in Australia this time round.

It’s a heck of a way to run a league. Dodging the national team leads to a short season (26 games per team) being jammed into what is left of an eight-month period.

That means games every five days or so. When the rest of the world is playing once every seven days.

When the whole league plays, on Sunday, they will have completed five rounds … in 21 days.

Yeah.

So, the league plays whenever it can. If it happens to be the two days that would be best for it — Thursday and Friday — it does. If it doesn’t work out … then they take on the Champions League and the Premier League and the Bundesliga, and all the rest.

Tomorrow night? The league has two games. But then come eight Champions League games, and before that one of the AGl clubs, Al Ain, is playing in the semifinals of the Asian Champions League.

Those two AGL games? Pretty much no one will see them, not even here.