Former Tottenham and Chelsea manager Mauricio Pochettino has made a bold claim that Chelsea's 2016/17 Premier League title should be retrospectively taken away and awarded to Spurs, citing the financial rule breaches later admitted by the club.
Chelsea finished that season as champions under Antonio Conte, with Tottenham ending up second, seven points adrift. Since then, however, Chelsea's ownership situation has changed dramatically, and the club has faced a series of financial penalties following investigations into historical rule breaches.
Earlier this year, Chelsea were fined £10.75 million by the Premier League and given a nine-month transfer ban on academy signings after breaching regulations. This followed a 2023 UEFA fine of £8.6 million for submitting incomplete financial information covering the period between 2012 and 2019. The breaches were linked to regulations governing agents, intermediaries, and third-party investment in players. Notably, it was Chelsea's own BlueCo consortium, which took over from Roman Abramovich in 2022, that self-reported the violations to the relevant authorities.
While the punishments have already been handed down, Pochettino argues they do not go far enough, insisting the true consequence should be the stripping of the title itself.
"We should win one Premier League, we should have been awarded it," Pochettino said. "If that [Chelsea's breaches] was true, then we deserve to be champions that year, for sure. They were punished. They admitted it? So that's it. The title should be for the team that was second."
The Argentine, who managed Tottenham during that title race before later taking charge of Chelsea himself between 2023 and 2024, acknowledged that Chelsea's on-field performances that season were strong, but maintained that the alleged uneven playing field undermines the legitimacy of the result.
"We can say that they scored goals, they won games. OK. But it's completely fair to say that we didn't compete before the start of the season with the same card," he said. "Maybe with the same rules, we could've signed some players that would have made the team better or scored more goals."
Pochettino, now in charge of the United States Men's National Team, was candid in admitting that his stance could prove unpopular among Chelsea supporters, but stressed that he would apply the same logic even if the situation were reversed.
"I have no doubt and I'm not scared to say the truth," he said. "The Chelsea fans will be upset with me. But if we were at Tottenham and broke the rules, I'd admit the same: 'We don't deserve the title because we broke the rules.'"
Drawing a comparison to on-pitch officiating standards, Pochettino argued that financial fair play should be treated with the same consistency as match-day rules like offside or VAR.
"It's impossible if only some clubs play with offside and another plays with no offside, or one plays with VAR and another plays with no VAR," he said. "For everyone, it needs to be the same rules. And then you have the capacity to create the best team."
He was careful to clarify that his comments were not intended as criticism of Conte's Chelsea side as a footballing unit, but rather a broader point about accountability. "I don't say that Chelsea didn't play well, that Conte was not great. I don't say that. I don't want the message to be twisted. But if you broke the rules then, ciao, you need to give it to another team," Pochettino said.
He went further, suggesting that the leniency of punishments across football sends the wrong message to clubs. "What is being promoted and incentivised is to break the rules. If you don't punish in the way that you need to punish, I say: 'Yeah, I lost my job [at Spurs] because we didn't win a title.'"
Based on reporting from Standard Sport.