We don’t talk much about the many and profound difficulties in being a professional athlete.

It’s like we rarely get past the “you get paid a lot of money to play games” part of this. It’s all gravy, once you have reached the big league.

Of course, it is not easy. Lots of down sides. Catastrophic injuries. Short careers. Grasping friends and relatives. Judgmental media and fans. Life in a fishbowl.

But I am going to focus on one specific aspect of the professional athlete here:

The personal upheaval of moving from one club to another.

Al Jazira, one of the UAE’s big soccer clubs, has acquired a Brazilian midfielder named Jucilei da Silva, most recently of Anzhi Makachkala.

Last week, Jucilei was playing in the Russian League, for an Anzhi team that a year ago was rolling in dough. Then their billionaire owner lost a big chunk of his fortune in, like, a week, and he began selling off the pieces of the club. Among them, Samuel Eto’o, now with Chelsea — his eighth club.

So, Jucilei, 25, had been at Anzhi when times were good and salaries were big. He arrived there young. Maybe he would be able to play there a long time. But then the club all but went bust. And he had to go. For all we know, he might not have been getting paid, lately; that happens in a high number of international leagues — owners just don’t pay their players.

Jucilei then moves to Abu Dhabi in the UAE, which represents a profound culture shock. Across the spectrum. From weather to religion.

And this is the part that resonates with me: When he arrived he immediately began praising the team that acquired him.

“Jazira are well known in Brazil,” he said. “It was an easy decision. It goes without saying that the club will have high expectations from me and I will do my best to deliver in the domestic competition as well as in the continental championship.

“I have the same hopes and ambitions as the club and their fans.  I want to spend as much time as possible at Jazira …”

And haven’t we heard a variation of that speech a thousand times before? From professional athletes in every team sport out there — soccer, football, basketball, baseball, hockey …

Every Single Guy shows up at the press conference with his new team and insists he is happy as hell to be where he is at that minute.

Where do these guys learn to say that? Do their agents teach them? Do they sit around with teammates and talk about what they will say the day they are sold or traded? How you have to love your new place or risk immediate censure?

And let’s concede it: We expect the New Guy to express sheer delight in being where we live. Whether that is Cleveland or Los Angeles, Sunderland or London, Guangzhou or Milan.

But how could every one of those guys be happy? How could any of them be happy?

They just left behind a routine they understood, as well as the friends they had made at the previous club, and maybe a girlfriend, perhaps an apartment they had just gotten decorated the way they like. And then, bang, they’re gone. Uprooted, shipped out, parachuted into a new situation.

I am impressed they can show up and spout positive things. When they must be apprehensive and disoriented and probably afraid of the unknown that surrounds them.

It would be one thing if a player were traded/sold only once in his career. That would be hard, but doable. Albert Pujols, for instance. He knew St. Louis, then he was in Anaheim, and there isn’t enough money to make that a seamless transition.

The reality is, most athletes play for more than two teams.  Those in the middle range (and down) of competence might play for a half-dozen teams.

Jucilei is 25, but he already has lived and played soccer in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, in Curitiba, in Sao Paolo, in Russia (where he probably lived in Moscow, flying to Anzhi, in Dagestan, for “home” games because Dagestan is too dangerous for footballers to live in) and now is in Abu Dhabi.

And he is by no means a particularly nomadic athlete. You or I could find hundreds of guys who have played with eight, nine, 10 clubs, or more. And at every one of them they arrived saying, “Wow, am I happy to be here!”

The player Jucilei is replacing is Ricardo Oliveira, also a Brazilian, who has played for nine clubs in four countries on three continents. He is 33 and one of those “good but not great” players who lasts long enough to never quite be home anywhere.

Octavio Dotel is the baseball record holder for most teams, with 13. But he is the extreme. More typical, in baseball? Three. Maybe four. With most of the movement at the start and end of a career, when your anxiety probably is already high.

The number of athletes who have significant careers and never get traded … maybe 1-2 percent? Willie Mays was traded. Wilt Chamberlain was traded. Johny Unitas was traded. And every time they moved they had to make believe they liked it.

Even in the modern world, where most of us are coming to grips with the idea of multiple jobs and companies before we retire … we rarely bang back and forth across a country or around the planet several times while we are in our 20s. (Unless we are active military, that is.)

I feel badly for athletes.

There was a time when I never thought about the upheaval that grips them when they go to a new club. Back when I assumed everyone was happy to be where I was — in comfortable and familiar surroundings.

We need to give athletes credit, especially when they are torn out of one place, dropped in another and still perform well.

Good luck, Jucilei da Silva. But rent, don’t buy.