The 2025 members of a football club run a tournament of “45-a-side” football matches, where each football match involves 90 people. After the tournament is concluded, it is noticed that no two football matches had four players in common. Prove that the number of football matches is less than 90.
Solution
Denote the players by and let the number of matches be . Also, denote the set of participants of match by for each . We will count, in two different ways, the total number of triples such that participates in match as well in match , i.e. and . Denote this total number of triples by .
First we count these triples by players. Suppose, for each , player plays in matches. We note that . Then the number of triples with and , is
where in the second line we have used the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality.
Next, we give an upper bound for the number of these triples by considering pairs of matches. We know that no pair of matches has more than 3 players in common, so
Combining (28) and (29) yields
which, upon simplifying, gives .
Therefore, the number of football matches is less than .