Roughly the population of Castel di Sangro when its football club reached Serie B in 1996. No smaller municipality has ever played in the second division of Italian football.
The town
Castel di Sangro is in the province of L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo mountains, near the border with Molise. It is a town of a few thousand people, high up, with winters that close the roads.
Its football club had spent its history in the regional and semi-professional divisions, which is what a town that size normally does.
In the summer of 1996 it was promoted to Serie B, one level below the Italian top flight. The stadium had to be adapted to meet the requirements of the division.
The season
Serie B in 1996-97 contained Genoa, Torino, Palermo, Venezia and Lecce, clubs with cities behind them. Castel di Sangro had a town.
The club stayed up.
The writer
Joe McGinniss was an American author who had written about politics and crime. He came to Castel di Sangro to spend a season with the smallest club in professional Italian football and wrote a book about it, published in 1999.
The book is the reason the story travelled beyond Abruzzo. It is also the reason the season is remembered as something other than a table position.
The tenth of December
On 10 December 1996 two of the club's players, Danilo Di Vincenzo and Filippo Biondi, were killed in a car crash.
The season continued.
What the number holds
Five thousand is a population, not a score. It is on the print because the achievement only makes sense next to it: a division built for cities, reached by a town in the mountains.
The rest of the story is why it is worth passing on.