Premier League Shirts Without Bookmakers in 2026-27: Which Clubs Replaced Betting Sponsors and With Whom

For about 20 years, a betting logo across the chest was simply part of how a Premier League shirt looked. Not anymore. The clubs agreed in April 2023 to pull gambling sponsorship from the front of matchday shirts, with a transition period that let existing deals expire, which makes 2026-27 the first top-flight season with no betting brand in that spot. Eight clubs had to find a new name for the most valuable patch of fabric they own, and a few of them cut it very close. 

But the rule is narrower than the headlines suggest. Sleeves, training tops, and the LED boards around the pitch are still open to gambling companies, so operators haven’t left English football. They’ve just moved a few inches, from the chest to the arm. That has people in the sponsorship business watching which brands step in next, and BetFury, a crypto-first gambling platform that has grown quickly since its 2019 launch, looks like the type of operator that could turn up in a Premier League partnership down the line.

The reasoning isn’t complicated. BetFury has grown into a go-to platform for crypto betting among mobile-first fans around the world, and that’s exactly the audience the old chest sponsors were paying to reach. A sleeve or training-kit deal with a Premier League club would probably give the brand real football exposure without the price tag of the shirt front. 

How the Premier League Gambling Shirt Ban Works

The rule itself is simple. A gambling company can’t occupy the main sponsor position on a matchday shirt. That’s it.

Clubs had three seasons to unwind their existing deals, and several waited until the deadline to sign replacements. And because it’s a voluntary agreement between the clubs rather than a law, the scope was always going to be limited. Here’s what betting brands can still do: 

• Sponsor shirt sleeves, which several clubs have handed straight to their former chest partners
• Appear on training kits and warm-up tops
• Buy pitchside LED advertising and other stadium signage
• Hold regional “official betting partner” titles, often aimed at Asian or European markets

Critics spotted the gap early. Will Prochaska of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads argued that the logos would remain visible on other parts of the shirt and around grounds, calling the move a way to head off tougher regulation. Supporters see it as a real first step. Both camps seem to agree on one thing, though: the chest is where most of the money and most of the attention sit. 

Which Clubs Replaced Betting Sponsors in 2026-27

The eight affected clubs went in very different directions. Some promoted a partner they already had, and others signed companies that most supporters had never heard of before the kit launch.

Aston Villa Sign Visit Rwanda

Villa had the biggest hole to fill. Their previous betting sponsor was reportedly paying around GBP 20 million a year, and the club replaced it with a multi-year Visit Rwanda deal said to be worth a similar amount. The agreement was signed in July 2026. Rwanda’s tourism board is no stranger to football, having spent years on Arsenal’s sleeves, so the club wasn’t taking a chance on an unknown. The smart part came next. Instead of losing the old partner entirely, Villa moved it to the sleeve, where gambling branding is still allowed. So the club kept both revenue streams and simply rearranged its shirt. 

Everton Bring In CMC Markets

Everton shifted their long-time crypto casino partner to the sleeve and put CMC Markets, a financial trading platform, on the chest in a deal reportedly worth about GBP 20 million a year, more than the previous front-of-shirt arrangement. For a club that just moved into a new stadium, that’s a decent result. 

Crystal Palace and Temporal

This is probably the most interesting case of the summer. Temporal is a US software company whose infrastructure helps complex applications keep running when things fail, and it counts OpenAI, Netflix, and Snapchat among its users. It doesn’t sell anything to the average fan in the Holmesdale Road stand. So why pay for a Premier League shirt? 

The answer is cost. Temporal’s CMO, Clair Byrd, said the company would have needed to spend five or six times more on other advertising to get the same reach it gets from Palace. Think about that for a second. A Premier League shirt, the most expensive ad space in English sport, turned out to be the budget option for a B2B tech firm trying to reach engineers and executives across Europe. Byrd also said the company treats London as its European center of gravity and wouldn’t have made an investment this size with a club outside the capital. That’s a detail most sponsorship pitches miss: geography still matters, even in a global TV product. 

Bournemouth, Brentford, Fulham, and Nottingham Forest

The other four took quieter routes, and two of them simply promoted someone already on the books.

• Bournemouth confirmed in December 2025 that Vitality, the insurer already linked to the club through its stadium, would move onto the shirt front from 2026-27, though reports described it as a reduced deal
• Brentford expanded their partnership with the jobs site Indeed in April 2026, making it principal partner 
• Fulham went with ClickHouse, a database software company
• Forest held out until August 2026 before naming financial services company Marex 

Sunderland, the Outlier

Sunderland are the awkward one. Their 2025-26 chest sponsor was an Asian-facing betting operator on a one-season deal that couldn’t be renewed under the new rules, and the club had called that agreement the largest in its history. As of autumn 2026, no replacement front-of-shirt partner has been confirmed, while a crypto casino has signed a multi-year sleeve deal. 

Is a blank shirt a negotiating tactic or a warning sign? Hard to say. Sunderland are playing in the Europa League this season despite being newly promoted, which should give any future sponsor extra exposure. Clubs with that kind of story usually don’t stay blank for long, but every week without a deal is money left on the table. 

Did the Gambling Ban Cost Premier League Clubs Money?

Before the season, the forecasts were gloomy. Gambling Insider reported a possible GBP 80 million shortfall, and The Sponsor’s editor Sean Connell had warned that affected clubs could lose about 38% of their front-of-shirt value on average by switching to non-gambling brands. The logic made sense on paper. If you take the highest bidders out of an auction, prices usually drop. 

Then the actual numbers arrived, and they told a different story. Ampere Analysis puts total Premier League front-of-shirt income at GBP 444 million for 2026-27, up from GBP 410 million a season earlier, an 8% rise. The eight clubs that had to replace betting partners swapped roughly GBP 67 million of gambling deals for about GBP 75 million in new agreements. So the feared crash didn’t happen, at least not in total. The catch is in who captured the growth. The traditional Big Six added GBP 46 million in sponsorship revenue on their own, which is more than the entire league’s net increase. In plain terms, the biggest clubs got richer and the clubs further down worked much harder just to stand still. 

There’s also a promoted-club problem. Front-of-shirt deals for newly promoted sides have reportedly dropped by about half since gambling money left the market. That’s a tough spot for any club arriving from the Championship with little bargaining power in year one. 

What Comes Next for Betting Brands in English Football

Gambling money hasn’t left football. It’s just found new doors. The Championship is expected to be full of front-of-shirt betting deals this season, and sleeve inventory at top-flight clubs has suddenly become a hot commodity. Newcastle, whose chest now carries the South African hydration brand Knox, extended a multi-year UK and European betting partnership in the same window. 

That shift opens space for newer operators, especially crypto-native ones that already think globally. A brand like BetFury, with a strong international user base and a product built for mobile-first fans, would seem to fit the sleeve-and-digital model that clubs are now selling hardest. Whether that happens in 2027 or later is anyone’s guess.

One small side note for collectors (and there are plenty of them). The 2025-26 kits are the last Premier League shirts with betting logos on the front, which gives them a clear end date, and that’s usually the kind of thing that makes an old shirt worth keeping in a drawer rather than a charity bag.