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 from The National, and it was supposed to be a test for the visitors. It was not.

They surged to a 3-0 lead, defended diligently and intelligently, and it finished 3-1.

Ahli has all but clinched the league, with four rounds still to play, and remains on track for a domestic treble (as the Brits like to say) — all three championships available in a UAE season, which has never been done here.

And I think I have a turning point.

Summer of 2010: Al Ahli signs Fabio Cannavaro.

Cannavaro was the captain of Italy’s 2006 World Cup winners and Fifa player of the year (and Ballon d’Or winner) in that same year. He was part of the galacticos at Real Madrid, when they also had Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham. He played at Juventus and Inter and Napoli.

He was a big deal.

Soccer fans, especially in Europe, who knew about Dubai as a place where life was lived with gusto and a lot of money, also made note that it was a place that hired Fabio Cannavaro.

Sure, he was pretty much done as an athlete when he arrived in Dubai; he was 37 just as the season started. But Ahli had been shaky the previous season, falling to an embarrassing eighth after winning the league in 2009 (and also losing to a semi-pro team from Auckland, New Zealand, in the first match of the Club World Cup, held in Abu Dhabi in December of 2009), and Something Needed to Be Done.

So Ahli’s main man, a businessman, not a royal, hired David O’Leary, former coach of a Leeds United semifinal Champions League team, and signed Fabio Cannavaro, a galactico and World Cup captain.

Ahli didn’t do much that season, either. They lost in Cannavaro’s debut, 2-0 (on a brutally hot August night in the desert), to a team that won only three times all season, and finished eighth again. Cannavaro had knee issues and was done before the season was, and O’Leary was fired after a 5-1 thrashing at Jazira in April.

Cannavaro, however, stayed on in Dubai. Turns out, he liked it, and Ahli officials liked having the handsome Italian around.

He took on an amorphous role as “team ambassador” … and his class stuck to the franchise like glitter on paint.

With that one move, Ahli had established themselves as the destination for footballers looking to move to the UAE for 1) nice money and 2) low-pressure football.

That led to Ahli signing Grafite, the Brazilian striker who had been the Bundesliga’s top scorer in 2008/09. (He has been tearing it up here since.) They got Luis Jimenez, formerly of Lazio, Inter and West Ham; and Ahli had interest (and cameos) from various internationals, including Ricardo Quaresmo and Jakson Coelho). Not all of them worked out, but a line seemed to be forming for foreigners who wanted to join Ahli.

More importantly, elite Emirati players began asking to move to Ahli.

This was and is crucial.

Each team can have no more than four foreigners, and one of them has to come from a nation in the Asian confederation.

The rest of your team is Emiratis and, as I have written before on this site, the champions here usually are the sides with the best batch of Emiratis.

Why? Because the pool of really useful UAE footballers is not deep. Maybe 25 good guys right at the top, and then it thins out fairly quickly — which is not shocking, considering the Emirati population is probably still under 1 million.

Basheer Saeed may have been the first to verbalize that he wanted to go to Ahli. He had been a fine defender at Al Wahda, and helped them win a title in 2010, and a year later he wanted to go to Ahli — and Wahda sent him.

Ahli also collected the best player, a defender, from Sharjah, a former UAE power; and, this season, the two best players (by their coach’s admission) from Al Shabab, another Dubai side, a Brazilian named Ciel and an Emirati defender named Walid Abbas.

When looking at the rosters of the two teams, Ahli and Jazira, during Sunday’s game, we found this startling statistic:

Ahli has no fewer than six current members of the UAE national team — which is better right now than it has been maybe, ever — and all six of them have a very good chance to be in the UAE first team.

Jazira, meanwhile, put on the field three members of the UAE national team, all starters. But half Ahli’s number.

And on top of everything else, Ahli have been scoring big with their recent coaching hires.

Before the 2011-12 season, they hired Quique Sanchez Flores, a Spaniard who played for Valencia and Real Madrid, and coached Valencia, Benfica among others, and Atletico Madrid.

He led Ahli to the league cup title in his first season, and the President’s Cup (the local version of England’s FA Cup) in his second. He then left, and Ahli went out and hired/stole Cosmin Olaroiu — who had taken Al Ain to the league titles in 2012 and 2013.

(Sure, it led to a lawsuit from Al Ain, now Ahli’s arch-arch-arch rivals, and fines and the chance of jail time for the coach, but he’s running Ahli, and he’s about to win his third straight title, so he must be pretty good at what he does.)

Ahli needs one point in its final four matches to clinch title No. 6 (Al Ain leads the country with 11). It plays Jazira in the league cup final on April 19, and it plays Al Ain for the President’s Cup in May — and it is still alive to advance to the final 16 of the Asian Champions League, leaving open the possibility of four titles in one calendar year.

So, Ahli. Good. Getting better. And it started with Fabio Cannavaro.