Many local conformal field theories can be analytically continued to a family of nonlocal, long-range CFTs by varying the exponent of the kinetic term $(p^2)^{\zeta}$ in the action away from the usual $\zeta=1$. It is natural to then ask what singles out the original local CFT within each such family. The answer is neat -- it has the most degrees of freedom, as counted by the (universal part of the) sphere free energy, also sometimes called the central charge. This provides a simple organising principle for models such as the critical Ising and O(N) vector CFTs in any d, and a compact way of organising perturbative data for their scaling dimensions. For unitary CFTs, this extremum is a maximum, which can be proven in conformal perturbation theory. In this talk, I will first give an introduction to nonlocal CFTs, then discuss counting degrees of freedom in CFTs, and finally prove the main result.