Sign the petition to say yes to mathematically complicated footballs!

The classic football is made from white hexagons and black pentagons. Since it was introduced at the 1974 World Cup it has become the definitive ball.

But for some reasons the street signs in the UK for football stadiums incorrectly show the pentagons as hexagons. Six sides instead of five! Not only is this wrong, but it is mathematically impossible to make a ball out of only hexagons. These British street signs are geometric fantasy.

Matt Parker ran a previous campaign to get the street signs fixed, resulting in enough signatures on a parliamentary petition that the Government was obliged to explain themselves.

They said no.

“The purpose of a traffic sign is not to raise public appreciation and awareness of geometry”

Matt has now commissioned a new football which, from one specific angle, looks like the street signs. It is impossible to make a football only out of hexagons, the twelve pentagons from the original design need to go somewhere. Working with custom football designer Jon-Paul Wheatley he made a new design that hides some squashed pentagons around the side and uses a distorted octagon to patch it all together.

It's a terrible ball for competitive football because the geometry is so complicated. Or so the experts at Liverpool Football Club said. But it's the only option we have to resolve the geometrically embarrassing street signs.

Please sign this petition now to put pressure on the Premier League to switch to this new “Impossi-ball”. Because if we can't get the signs changed to match a real football, maybe we can get the football changed to match the signs.

Read more about the Impossible Ball in Matt Parker’s new book Love Triangle. Pre-order a signed copy now from Maths Gear!