The Zlatan Number
Erdős has one, Kevin Bacon has one, and football has Zlatan. Your Zlatan number is how many club dressing rooms stand between you and him.
- 297,224Players
- 3.17Mean number
- 11Highest number
Erdős and Bacon
An Erdős number counts the co-authorships between a mathematician and Paul Erdős, the prolific Hungarian who wrote with almost everyone. A Bacon number, from the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, counts films between an actor and Kevin Bacon. Both are jokes that turn out to say something real about how tightly a field is connected.
Why Zlatan
Erdős and Bacon are both prolific and both good company, which is what makes them work as the centre of a game. Football has an obvious candidate. Zlatan Ibrahimović played in four of Europe's five biggest leagues, for some of the best clubs in the world, scored 570 career goals, won twelve domestic titles, finished top scorer in six seasons, and once observed that he could not help laughing at how perfect he is.
A player's Zlatan number is 1 if they were at a club at the same time as him, 2 if they shared a club with someone who did, and so on.
How the 297,224 players divide
Almost everyone is within a handful of steps: 66% of all players sit at 3, and the furthest anyone gets is 11. That is what a densely connected sport looks like counted out.
| 0 | 1 |
|---|---|
| 1 | 463 |
| 2 | 37,494 |
| 3 | 197,407 |
| 4 | 45,918 |
| 5 | 8,900 |
| 6 | 4,081 |
| 7 | 2,341 |
| 8 | 432 |
| 9 | 152 |
| 10 | 24 |
| 11 | 11 |