I doubt many people in the Gulf region know that the Women’s World Cup is going on.

Women’s soccer is not big here. Sometimes, it’s not played at all. (Hello, Saudi.) The UAE and Bahrain, to name two, recently ramped up their support of women’s soccer, but it will be a while before any team from this part of the world is ready to compete evenly with Asian rivals Thailand or South Korea — let alone Australia or the 2011 champions Japan.

Several factors are at work in the Gulf to relegate the Women’s World Cup to only occasional mention in local media.

To wit:

–European Cup qualifying. The Euro Cup is the big summer event of 2016, and now that it has been expanded to 24 teams (from 16) it has lots more qualifying, and the Euro men’s teams are playing seemingly all the time now. Abu Dhabi Sports has the rights to qualifying, and tonight we have our choice of two games on free TV: Cyprus versus Andorra or Malta versus Croatia. If we were willing to pay, we could have seen Wales (Gareth Bale) and Belgium.

–The Copa America. This is a fairly big deal, too — South America’s 10 teams, plus Mexico and Jamaica. Started last night. This is the tournament in which Lionel Messi (Argentina), Neymar (Brazil) and Luis Suarez (Uruguay) are playing.

–Asian qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. Yes. Really big. Yesterday, I watched (sorta), in succession, a UAE friendly with South Korea in Kuala Lumpur, Lebanon versus Kuwait and Yemen versus North Korea in Doha.

–The timezone issues. The Women’s World Cup, in Canada, seems to be going off from about 3 a.m., in the UAE, to 5 a.m. BeIn sports, the name Al Jazeera gave to its sports network, is showing it, but not many people who get BeIn are going to get up in the middle of the night to watch.

So, the WWC, and Abby Wambach and the Yanks, going pretty much unseen here.

We will be in Greece next week, and maybe we can catch up on the WWC there.