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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.
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. Many of these secret transactions, routed through Abramovich’s network of offshore companies, were revealed in an investigation published by the Guardian and international partners in 2023.
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 goals.”
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.
“Maybe yes,” Pochettino replied. “I have no doubt and I’m 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’d admit the same: ‘We don’t deserve the title because we broke the rules.’
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“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. For everyone it needs to be the same rules. And then you have the capacity to create the best team.
“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. I don’t know why that didn’t happen. 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.’”
