Burnley Ends Finotive One Deal as Vertu Motors Steps In
Burnley’s new season will kick off with a different name on the front of the shirt than the one they proudly unveiled barely a month and a half ago.
On Friday, the club tore up their agreement with Finotive One, a self-styled “trading ecosystem”, just 42 days after announcing the partnership. The club have stayed silent on the finer details of how and why it collapsed, but the timing alone tells you this will not be cheap.
Supporters who snapped up the 2026-27 home and away kits with Finotive One across the chest have been offered full refunds or exchanges. Some will stash them away as curiosities from a sponsorship that barely existed. Most will trade them in for the new look: UK-wide car dealership Vertu Motors now stepping onto centre stage.
A star-studded launch, now in the bin
Only two weeks ago, Burnley were making noise about their cream away shirt. The club rolled out a glossy promotional video featuring minority investor and former NFL player JJ Watt, England cricket great James Anderson and even Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That big-budget clip is now redundant. The shirts have vanished from the club’s online store, and they will not be on sale at the ground before Sunday’s Premier League opener at home to West Ham United.
The first public hint that something had gone badly wrong came not from Turf Moor, but from a TV trailer. On Thursday, Sky Sports ran their promo for Sunday’s match. In it, Kyle Walker appeared in a Burnley shirt with no sponsor at all.
Odd, given Burnley had worn Finotive One branding all pre-season. Even last Saturday, in the Carabao Cup first-round tie against Notts County, the logo was still splashed across the front of the kit.
Then supporters noticed another tell-tale sign. All news stories about the Finotive One agreement quietly disappeared from the club’s official website.
By Friday morning, the inevitable statement arrived. Burnley confirmed the deal had been scrapped “to protect the club's interests, and those of our supporters”.
A familiar headache on the front of the shirt
This is not the first time Burnley have found themselves scrambling over a main sponsor.
LoveBet, an Asian betting company, signed a three-year deal but vanished from the shirt after only two seasons when it hit financial trouble. That change came shortly after AIK Capital completed their takeover in December 2020.
New chairman Alan Pace, facing criticism over the club’s ties to gambling brands, posted on X that sponsorship would be examined “as part of the overall commercial strategy for the club”. He warned that “historic contractual obligations” might limit immediate change, but promised to review it with his team for the long term.
The reality since then has been clear. Under AIK Capital, betting has dominated Burnley’s front-of-shirt landscape.
With the exception of a one-season deal in 2022-23 with Classic Football Shirts, every main sponsor in that era has been linked to gambling until this campaign. LoveBet gave way to SpreadEx, a fixed odds and spread betting firm. After Classic Football Shirts, Philippines-based gambling operator W88 took over.
In 2024, Burnley agreed a controversial two-year contract with 96.com, a betting site operated by TGP Europe. That association brought its own trouble. Last year, the Gambling Commission issued warnings to Burnley and three other clubs over links to TGP-run sites after the company surrendered its British gambling licence.
Investigators found TGP Europe had failed to carry out “sufficient checks on business partners” and had breached “anti-money laundering rules”. The message was blunt: Burnley’s sponsorship choices were under scrutiny.
From 96.com to Finotive One – and out again
Looking to move away from 96.com, Burnley took a different path. Finotive One, a Cyprus-registered company, arrived as a left-field option. It billed itself as an “all-in-one ecosystem” for traders, though little was publicly known about its operations or customer base.
On paper, the deal looked attractive. Internally, it would have appeared the most lucrative offer available only a few weeks ago.
Now it is gone, barely six weeks after being signed, leaving a trail of awkward questions and a lot of wasted marketing material.
Into that gap steps Vertu Motors. The dealership group has already been involved with Burnley since 2022 and has now moved from partner to front-of-shirt saviour.
The club have not disclosed the terms of the new arrangement, but the dynamics are obvious. Forced into a last-minute change, Burnley were hardly in a strong bargaining position. Any replacement was always likely to come on less favourable terms than the original Finotive One package.
Still, they have a sponsor in place, a logo for the cameras and a cleaner break from the gambling-heavy recent past.
What they also have, once again, is a reminder that for all the talk of long-term strategy and careful vetting, Burnley’s shirt has become a revolving door – and every hurried change leaves a mark.
