TILING DIRECTED GRAPHS WITH TOURNAMENTS

Abstract

The Hajnal–Szemerédi theorem states that for any positive integer $r$ and any multiple $n$ of $r$, if $G$ is a graph on $n$ vertices and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}(G)\geqslant (1-1/r)n$, then $G$ can be partitioned into $n/r$ vertex-disjoint copies of the complete graph on $r$ vertices. We prove a very general analogue of this result for directed graphs: for any positive integer $r$ with $r\neq 3$ and any sufficiently large multiple $n$ of $r$, if $G$ is a directed graph on $n$ vertices and every vertex is incident to at least $2(1-1/r)n-1$ directed edges, then $G$ can be partitioned into $n/r$ vertex-disjoint subgraphs of size $r$ each of which contain every tournament on $r$ vertices (the case $r=3$ is different and was handled previously). In fact, this result is a consequence of a tiling result for standard multigraphs (that is multigraphs where there are at most two edges between any pair of vertices). A related Turán-type result is also proven.