A campaign to change “misleading” road signs for football grounds has been snubbed by Department for Transport because it has no duty to “raise awareness about geometry”.

The rebuttal follows a petition calling for the brown football sign used across the country to be changed because it is geometrically flawed, which has so far received more than 20,000 signatures.

The current symbol recognised under UK law is a brown football made up of white and dark hexagons.

But a petition launched by a mathematician from the London Mathematical Society claims that the design is “mathematically impossible”, and should be changed to include a number of pentagons.

Matt Parker, an Australian maths lecturer and stand-up comedian, says that the ball should reflect the composition of an actual football.