I can state categorically that before arriving in the UAE, I had no idea the English city of Wigan had a serious soccer team.

I very possibly had never heard of Wigan at all, which I am not going to feel bad about because 1) it is not a place tourists go, on purpose and 2) Wigan is far better known as a rugby town, and I follow rugby not at all.

I became fully aware of Wigan (though I still tend to confuse them with Stoke) when I joined the sports department of The National in 2010, and English soccer is a big part of what we cover.

I now know Wigan has been in the Premier League since 2005, and most of that time has fought for survival, including this year, when it looks like they may finally be relegated.

But before they go down, they get a day in the sun in the FA Cup final at Wembley tomorrow, against Manchester City.

We at The National took notice of Wigan’s surprise arrival in the final of England second-biggest competition, and how it not only deals with all the issues facing a not-big club in the Premier League … but also is the only team in the league that comes from a community where the rugby team is bigger than the soccer team.

In this story, our English correspondent Andy Mitten looks into Wigan Athletic’s history as a football club, which began relatively late; 1932, to be exact. By then, nearly every village in England who could come up with 11 guys for a kick-about, had a team.

Wigan, however, for some reason became a rugby hotbed, and remains one to this day. The Wigan Warriors have been the most successful team in the country in the rugby league version of the game.

Our story notes that, in Wigan, all schools play rugby but not all play soccer, which is an almost unimaginable state of affairs.

Wigan, however, has a dogged and likeable club, owned by a local guy, Dave Whelan, a former professional footballer, who made good in the sporting goods business, eventually took over Wigan Athletic, and has run it intelligently for nearly two decades.

Wigan’s Spanish coach, Roberto Martinez, also seems an agreeable chap, who somehow gets his teams to play hard and somehow avoid finishing in the bottom three of one of the best leagues in the world.

To put this in terms a traditional American sports fan might more easily understand, Wigan playing Manchester City in the FA Cup final would be like an NCAA basketball title game pitting Kentucky against Florida Gulf Coast. The one a team that has been around a very long time, and usually done well, and the other a late-comer who is not supposed to be playing in games this important.

It makes the FA Cup fun. It is no longer as big an event as it once was; the Champions League has outstripped it as a knockout event. But it still gets the attention of fans of English football, and most of them are likely to be pulling for Wigan and hoping that their perhaps 10 percent chance of beating City comes through tomorrow.