In the vast world of academia and Hollywood, there exist two intriguing measures known as Erdős numbers and Bacon numbers, which quantify a person’s collaborative or acting connections, respectively. Erdős numbers originated from the world of mathematics, named after the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. They signify how many “degrees of separation” one has from publishing a paper with Erdős. On the other hand, Bacon numbers, inspired by the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” measure the degrees of separation between an actor and Kevin Bacon through film appearances. While seemingly unrelated, both numbers offer fascinating insights into the interconnectedness of human endeavors, whether through scholarly research or cinematic performances.

Paul Erdős and Kevin Bacon are both iconic and prolific in their line of work and both have a somewhat colorful personality. They thus make for good individuals to build a pop culture around six degrees of separation. To do something similar in the world of football, there seems to be no better choice than Zlatan Ibrahimović. Zlatan is undoubtedly a colorful character (“I can’t help but laugh at how perfect I am.”) and his career stats are quite impressive as well. Not only has he played in four of the five biggest leagues in Europe (England, Spain, Italy, France) but also for some of the best clubs in the world. He has scored 570 career goals, including more than 500 club goals. He won 12 domestic titles and was the best goal scorer in 6 seasons. We thus propose to introduce the “Zlatan number” in honor of his career and personality.

The Zlatan Number of a player is 1 if they have played together at the same club. The number is 2 if a player has played at the same club as someone who has played at the same club as Zlatan, and so on.