Mauricio Pochettino says Chelsea should be stripped of their 2016-17 Premier League title for financial rule breaches and the honour retrospectively awarded to Tottenham, who he led to second place that season. Chelsea were fined £10m by the Football Association in July and given a suspended two-window transfer ban for multiple violations of the rules during the Roman Abramovich era. They were also fined £10.75m by the Premier League in March.
According to The Guardian, the club were found to have used unlicensed agents and sought to obscure the nature of their transfer business between 2009 and 2022. The deals that took Eden Hazard, Willian, David Luiz and Nemanja Matic to Stamford Bridge were among those found to have transgressed. Those players were central to Chelsea’s 2016-17 triumph under Antonio Conte.
The club’s BlueCo ownership self-reported the breaches when it took over from Abramovich in 2022 in the hope of mitigating the punishment, and the club avoided a points deduction. Pochettino, who went on to manage Chelsea in 2023-24 and is in charge of the US, believes the authorities did not go nearly far enough. His Spurs team finished seven points behind Conte’s Chelsea.
“We should win one Premier League, we should have been awarded it,” Pochettino said as part of a wide-ranging interview. “If that [Chelsea’s rule-break] 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. “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. Maybe with the same rules, we could’ve signed some players that would have made the team better or scored more