Expats come and expats go, in the UAE.

And especially in soccer.

The South American or African introduced amid fanfare when a transfer window comes open … often is dumped a half-season later. It happens because UAE teams depend so heavily on foreigners to score goals, and goal scoring is such an easily measured number.

But also because the relationship between expat player and club is particularly mercenary.

A UAE club might keep an Emirati player for years, perhaps for the whole of his career. But if an expat that hits a rough patch he can expect to be dumped, and sooner than later.

Which brings us to Ricardo Oliveira, one of the expat success stories, who spent some or all of five seasons with Al Jazira, then had a bad month … and is now in limbo.

I wrote an “appreciation of” piece on Ricardo Oliveira for The National.

I never spoke with the man, but I watched him play dozens of times. Maybe 50 times.

He was prominent for a batch of reasons.

–He remains the most expensive player brought into the UAE, five years after it happened. Jazira gave nearly $20 million to the Spanish club Real Betis to bring in the Brazilian striker.

–Oliveira was a key figure in Jazira’s 2011 league championship, its first, as well as the President’s Cup victories (Nos. 1 and 2) in 2011 and 2012.

–He was/is such a graceful player. (If you followed the link, you see a guy who is running at top speed while controlling the ball almost effortlessly.) His goals often came with a high degree of difficulty, and he made them look easy because he has the balance and body control not always available to someone who runs as well as he does.

(More than once, I suggested that if the domestic league ran a decathlon for all the players in it … Oliveira would win. That combination of speed, durability, strength and competitiveness.)

–And, in 2011-12, be had perhaps the greatest season ever seen in the UAE, when he scored 41 goals in 41 games across four competitions, including 12 in seven Asian Champions League matches, and the Champions League is the toughest competition a UAE club can be enter. His hot streak helped Jazira win its group, which no UAE team had done since 2007 (despite four UAE teams making the tournament since 2009), and his added-time goal should have been a clincher in the last-16 match with Saudi’s Al Ahli.

That made him a Jazira fixture, and foreigners just don’t last like that, generally. Especially once they get into their 30s (and Oliveira is 33) and pick up the stray injury that is a near-certainty for players of that vintage. Oliveria may have a knee thing going on, actually.

Jazira last week replaced him with a Ecuadorian forward, Felipe Caicedo, who is likely to play in the 2014 World Cup. Caicedo was owned by Manchester City for three seasons and was loaned to Sporting, Malaga and Levante before moving to Lokomotiv Moscow, his most recent stop.

We would expect Caicedo is competent, but we won’t know until a few months.

What we do know is Ricardo Oliveira was a clutch and classy player. He had to be, to last most of five seasons in the UAE. I thought someone needed to make note of that.