Burnley Ends Finotive One Sponsorship for Vertu Motors Ahead of Season

Burnley’s new season will start with a different name across their shirts – and a sizeable headache behind the scenes.

Just 42 days after announcing Finotive One as their front-of-shirt sponsor, the club have torn up the agreement and turned instead to Vertu motors, a UK-wide car dealership, in a late scramble before Sunday’s opener against West Ham United.

The decision has come at a cost, both financial and reputational.

From fanfare to fallout in six weeks

At the end of June, Burnley were pushing the Finotive One partnership hard. The company, a Cyprus-registered “trading ecosystem”, was sold as a bold, modern fit. The club launched their cream away kit with a glossy, star-packed promotional video featuring minority investor and former NFL player JJ Watt, ex-England cricketer James Anderson and even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Two weeks later, that video is effectively useless. Shirts carrying the Finotive One branding have been pulled from the club’s website. They will not be on sale at the club shop before West Ham visit Turf Moor.

Supporters who bought the 2026-27 home or away shirts with Finotive One on the front have been offered full refunds or exchanges. Some fans may now cling to those jerseys as collectors’ items from a sponsorship that barely existed. Most are expected to trade them in for the new Vertu-branded version.

Burnley have declined to spell out exactly why the deal collapsed, but the abrupt termination so close to the season suggests a significant financial hit. On Friday morning, the club confirmed only that the agreement had been scrapped “to protect the club’s interests, and those of our supporters”.

Clues in plain sight

The first signs that something was wrong surfaced before the official announcement.

On Thursday, Sky Sports ran a promo for Sunday’s match that showed Kyle Walker in a Burnley shirt with no sponsor logo. That jarred with what fans had seen all summer, as Vincent Kompany’s side – and then their Carabao Cup XI against Notts County last Saturday – ran out in kits emblazoned with Finotive One.

Then supporters noticed that every news story about the Finotive One partnership had quietly disappeared from Burnley’s official website. By the time the club went public on Friday, many had already joined the dots.

Vertu motors, which has been a commercial partner of Burnley since 2022, moved into the gap. The dealership’s branding will now front the shirts for the new campaign. The exact terms of the hastily arranged deal are unclear, but with the clock ticking down to the first league fixture, Burnley were never going to be negotiating from a position of strength. Only weeks ago, the Finotive One contract appeared to be the most lucrative option on the table.

Now it is gone, after just six weeks – and Burnley are left to deal with the fallout.

A troubled sponsorship history

For Burnley, this is not an isolated misstep. Shirt sponsorship has been a recurring problem throughout the AIK Capital era.

LoveBet, an Asian betting brand, signed a three-year agreement but disappeared after only two, hit by financial difficulties. That exit came soon after AIK Capital completed their takeover in December 2020.

New chairman Alan Pace publicly acknowledged concerns around the club’s reliance on gambling money. He wrote on X that the issue would be examined “as part of the overall commercial strategy for the club”, while warning there were “historic contractual obligations” that limited immediate change.

Yet gambling brands continued to dominate. Aside from a one-season deal in 2022-23 with Classic Football Shirts, every front-of-shirt sponsor under AIK Capital has been tied to the betting industry.

LoveBet gave way to SpreadEx, a fixed odds and spread betting company. After Classic Football Shirts, Philippines-based gambling firm W88 took over. In 2024, Burnley struck a controversial two-year agreement with 96.com, a betting website run by TGP Europe.

That relationship brought its own scrutiny. Last year, the Gambling Commission issued warnings to Burnley and three other clubs over their links to sites operated by TGP Europe, which had surrendered its British gambling licence. Investigators found the company had failed to carry out “sufficient checks on business partners” and had breached “anti-money laundering rules”.

With pressure mounting and 96.com out of the frame, Burnley tried a different path. Finotive One offered a break from gambling, but raised fresh questions of its own. Little was publicly known about its operations or customer base beyond the company’s own marketing lines about an “all-in-one ecosystem” for traders.

That bet has now backfired, leaving the club scrambling for a replacement and their commercial judgment under the microscope once again.

Vertu’s chance, Burnley’s test

Vertu motors’ elevation from partner to principal sponsor gives the dealership a far bigger platform and hands Burnley a sponsor with a clearer footprint in the UK market. For a fanbase tired of seeing betting logos dominate the front of the shirt, that shift will be welcomed by many.

The timing is awkward, though. The club have had to withdraw and replace stock, refund or exchange shirts and rewrite their marketing plans just days before the season starts. The high-profile launch video, built around global names, has been rendered redundant almost overnight.

Burnley insist the decision to walk away from Finotive One was taken to safeguard the club and its supporters. The question now is whether this latest twist finally pushes them toward a more stable, transparent commercial strategy – or whether another short-lived logo will be lining up for its turn on the front of the shirt in a year’s time.