Ah, so it wasn’t just his missing the game. Not all about “don’t know what to do with myself.”

It also was about getting paid.

According to a newspaper report in Mexico, Landon Donovan will be paid $180,000 per month by the Liga MX club that has brought him out of retirement.

In North American soccer, $180,000 per month is serious money. That alone might have been enough to end, for the moment, Donovan’s search for his role in soccer, away from the pitch.

The average season salary in Major League Soccer is $317,000, and the median seasonal salary is a modest $117,000. (Doesn’t seem particularly “Major League”, does it.)

Landon’s reported salary blows those numbers out of the water, and who among us would pass that up when the options mostly are “working for free … volunteering my time.”

It would be worth the strain of getting into top physical condition, I would think, and Landon, 36 in March, probably will have some strain involved, considering his has played parts of nine matches over the past three years.

Where does Donovan’s reported salary fit, in the global picture?

It is less impressive when we consider the big-five soccer leagues in Europe — England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France.

The average weekly salary in England’s Premier League is $70,000, according to research done by the Global Sports Salary Survey and cited by the BBC. That’s for everyone in the league, whether it is Chelsea or West Brom.

Weekly pay is significantly higher at the big teams, with the Manchester clubs paying about 100,000 pounds sterling (a bit short of $140,000) per player, per week.

But that is a different world.

Back in the western hemisphere, Landon’s deal is quite attractive.

According to Fox Sports, he was paid $4.6 million for his final full season, in 2014, and that put him among the top-paid players in the league — which seems fitting, for the top-scorer in MLS history.

But those of us who are (or were) retired certainly can be enticed by a salary considerably more than we received last month — which in a lot of cases is zero dollars. (We’re retired, remember? Not working.)

In short, then, Landon had been away from the playing field for two years, and had not quite figured out the next chapter in his career, and possibly was not getting a salary of significance from anyone … and here came Club Leon, and its (reported) $180,000 a month.

By the middle of February, he will have done a month with the team, and will have blown past the annual MLS median salary of $117,000.

Liga MX apparently is outstripping MLS on the salary front. According to a 2015 chart in The Daily Mail, the average annual salary for players in Mexico’s top flight, in 2014, was 10th in the world, at about $368,000, leaving it second in the western hemisphere to Brazil — and well ahead of MLS, which was 22nd in the world, behind Greece.

So, good on Landon, as the Australians would say. Hope he can get in more than a few months’ worth of life in Liga MX.