If you've ever had to drive through a city or near a football stadium, you probably will have seen road signs designed to direct football fans looking for the venue in the right direction. These signs are typically brown, the colour used to denote an attraction or facility like a zoo or museum, and they often feature a picture of a football.
But did you know that almost every football stadium road sign in the country is technically incorrect? One eagle-eyed football fan has pointed out there's a glaring problem with the picture of the football on these signs - and he's campaigning to have them changed.
In a clip of the Things People Do podcast that was shared on TikTok, host Joe Marler spoke to Matt Parker, a mathematician who went viral back in 2017 for uncovering the issue with football road signs.
Matt explained that a football is made up of pieces of material shaped as pentagons and hexagons. Normally, the white sections are hexagons, and the darker spots are pentagons - as this allows the finished product to form a ball.
But in the street signs, every shape in the picture is a hexagon.
In the podcast clip, he said: "I have been trying to get the government to change the street signs for a football stadium for a very long time. The picture of a football on the UK street signs is incorrect. The dark coloured panels should be pentagons, with five sides, and they've depicted them as hexagons, with six sides.
"The reason it winds me up is that mathematically, it's impossible to make a football out of only hexagons. That is mathematically impossible."
Matt went on to say that in a 2D flat image like the one on the road sign, hexagons "work great" because they fit together well. But if you were to take the hexagons and make them a 3D football, the pieces would never join together to form a ball.
He continued: "In 3D, if you actually cut them out of that sign and tried to stitch them together into a ball and do the other side, it would never line up. You'd never be able to close that ball and finish stitching it together."
The mathematician, from Godalming, previously started a petition in 2017 to get the government to change the signs, and although 20,000 people signed in support of the change, the government at the time shut him down.
The Department for Transport said at the time that the purpose of traffic signs is to get drivers to take in information quickly, and the symbols are merely a "general representation" of the activity.
A spokesman said: "The purpose of a traffic sign is not to raise public appreciation and awareness of geometry, which is better dealt with in other ways.
"The higher level of attention needed to understand the geometry could distract a driver's view away from the road for longer than necessary, which could therefore increase the risk of an incident."
Responding to the government's comments, Matt previously told the BBC that he had specifically asked not to change the current signs, but to set a precedent for new signs going forward.
A spokesman said: "The purpose of a traffic sign is not to raise public appreciation and awareness of geometry, which is better dealt with in other ways."The higher level of attention needed to understand the geometry could distract a driver's view away from the road for longer than necessary, which could therefore increase the risk of an incident."
Responding to the government's comments, Matt previously told the BBC that he had specifically asked not to change the current signs, but to set a precedent for new signs going forward.
