{"id":766068,"date":"2026-09-10T10:54:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T10:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/766068\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T10:54:40","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T10:54:40","slug":"chelseas-2016-17-premier-league-title-should-be-given-to-spurs-says-pochettino-mauricio-pochettino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/766068\/","title":{"rendered":"Chelsea\u2019s 2016-17 Premier League title should be given to Spurs, says Pochettino | Mauricio Pochettino"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Chelsea were fined \u00a310m by the Football Association<\/a> 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 \u00a310.75m by the Premier League<\/a> in March.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 2016-17 triumph under Antonio Conte. Many of these secret transactions, routed through Abramovich\u2019s network of offshore companies, were revealed in an investigation published by the Guardian and international partners<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

The club\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s Chelsea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should win one Premier League, we should have been awarded it,\u201d Pochettino said as part of a wide-ranging interview. \u201cIf that [Chelsea\u2019s rule-break] was true, then we deserve to be champions that year, for sure. They were punished, they admitted it? So that\u2019s it. The title should be for the team that was second.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can say that they scored goals, they won games. OK. But it\u2019s completely fair to say that we didn\u2019t compete before the start of the season with the same card. Maybe with the same rules, we could\u2019ve signed some players that would have made the team better or scored more goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between 2009 and 2022, Chelsea won three league titles, two Champions Leagues, two Europa Leagues, four FA Cups and one League Cup. It was put to Pochettino that Hazard had made a particular difference in the 2016-17 title race; the winger scored 16 goals in the competition.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe yes,\u201d Pochettino replied. \u201cI have no doubt and I\u2019m not scared to say the truth. The Chelsea fans will be upset with me. But if we were at Tottenham and broke the rules, I\u2019d admit the same: \u2018We don\u2019t deserve the title because we broke the rules.\u2019<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s 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. For everyone it needs to be the same rules. And then you have the capacity to create the best team.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t say that Chelsea didn\u2019t play well, that Conte was not great. I don\u2019t say that. I don\u2019t want the message to be twisted. But if you broke the rules then ciao \u2013 you need to give it to another team. I don\u2019t know why that didn\u2019t happen. What is being promoted and incentivised is to break the rules. If you don\u2019t punish in the way that you need to punish, I say: \u2018Yeah \u2026 I lost my job [at Spurs] because we didn\u2019t win a title.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mauricio Pochettino says Chelsea should be stripped of their 2016-17 Premier League title for financial rule breaches and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":766069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-766068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}