I’ve seen a lot of soccer, over the past 25 years. From AYSO to the World Cup. Hundreds of matches. Maybe a thousand.

But I still do not know this game in the way that someone who grew up playing and watching it does.

I don’t know soccer like I do baseball, basketball, (American) football, all of which I played … and which were the background noise of my life. And I rarely watched it before the age of 30 — because it just didn’t matter, in the United States.

A month or so ago, a British colleague mentioned how three brothers on a UAE club team were primarily left-footed.

I had never noticed. I looked. He was correct.

This is not a first time I had an “oh, really?” moment while covering soccer. Some of my shortcomings, I already knew. For example, the two passes before the goal? I almost never get them, without the aid of replay.

Another instance of not knowing the subtleties of the game: When I interviewed a kid on the UAE Olympic soccer team … who has an arrangement with Adidas. Yes. Adidas.

I actually said this to a media-relations guy, before the interview. “If you had asked me to rank the guys on the Olympic team … I would have put him about 15th. I have no idea why Adidas picked him.”

I had covered his first, second and third matches with the Olympic team. Three games the UAE won to qualify for the London 2012 Olympics. And if you had asked me to rank the 11 guys on the field for those three crucial matches, he would have been somewhere between “10th” and “I don’t remember him doing anything.” Mostly because he is a defensive midfielder, and I tend to see the ball … and I tend not to see guys in defense.

Turns out, the guy is considered a rising star by people who follow these things. Like major shoe companies. Adidas has made Khamis Esmail an “ambassador” of its new Predator shoe.

So. I talked to Khamis Esmail, and like every other Emirati soccer player with whom I have spoken, he was unfailingly polite and answered every question in multiple sentences (via translator). I got more good stuff than I could use.

Here is that story, which ran in The National.

As the interview went along, it finally dawned on me that, “hey, maybe this guy is pretty good.” Or at least is expected to be pretty good. Some of the other Predator “ambassadors”: David Beckham and Kaka.

Something I did notice, in person, is that he is a pretty big guy. Especially for a midfielder. Maybe 6-1 and a solid 170. Usually, the UAE’s midfielders are tiny. Like, really tiny.

I got back to the office, from Dubai, and called one of our best local sources when it comes to UAE football, and he raved about the kid. Without knowing that Adidas had picked him out of the Olympic team for the commercial ties.

“He has a good body; our main players in midfield are always short, but this guy has then body and the talent,” Kefah Al Kaabi said. “The No. 6 is a problem in all our teams, but we may have a very good player in that place now, both on the Olympic team and the senior team, too.”

I suppose my first clue should have been Khamis Esmail not missing a single league match for Al Jazira, the defending champion, in the first half of the league season. And then him moving into the Olympic team just as crunch time was arriving.

If I had grown up with the game, would I have noticed the “big new kid in midfield”? Maybe. Probably.

Maybe if I stick with this game another few years, I may figure out all the nuances of it.

Maybe. Probably not.