Pochettino's Claim: Spurs Deserve 2016-17 Premier League Title
Mauricio Pochettino has never been a man short of conviction. Now he has one more: Tottenham should be Premier League champions for 2016-17.
Not in spirit. On paper.
The former Spurs manager, who took that side to a club-record 86 points and second place, believes Chelsea’s title – won by seven points – was built on rule-breaking that has since been admitted and punished with fines.
His logic is brutal in its simplicity.
"If they admitted they broke the rules, the Premier League title was for the second-best team," he said.
In other words: if Chelsea were ineligible, the crown should slide across London to the white half.
Secret payments, real trophies
The backdrop is stark. A Premier League investigation found Chelsea made about £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties between 2011 and 2018 to help secure transfers.
Those deals covered some of the club’s biggest names of the era: Eden Hazard, Samuel Eto'o, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, Andre Schurrle and Nemanja Matic.
Four of them – Hazard, Willian, Luiz and Matic – were in Antonio Conte’s squad in 2016-17, the season Chelsea racked up 93 points and finished above Pochettino’s Tottenham.
Across that wider period, Chelsea stacked up silverware: two Premier League titles (2014-15, 2016-17), two FA Cups (2011-12, 2017-18), the EFL Cup (2014-15) and the Europa League (2018-19).
Uefa, the Premier League and the Football Association have all fined the club. Pochettino’s view? That barely scratches the surface.
He has become one of the first heavyweight voices to say what many in the game have muttered for months: a fine feels lenient for a club that used secret payments while others took points deductions for lesser financial breaches.
Everton and Nottingham Forest fans have made that comparison loudly enough. Their clubs were docked points for profit and sustainability issues. Chelsea, by contrast, sought to land elite talent using undeclared payments.
And hanging over all of this is the unresolved, far bigger case: Manchester City’s 115 charges for alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules, with no verdict in sight.
So, does Pochettino have a case? And how much did those four Chelsea players really tilt the 2016-17 title race?
Hazard: the face of a tainted era
If there is a single symbol of this saga, it is Eden Hazard.
Chelsea beat almost every major European club to sign him from Lille for £32m in 2012. According to the investigation, between May 2013 and August 2016 the club made seven payments totalling £5.6m to an unregistered agent "for the benefit of the club in connection with Hazard's transfer".
Pochettino’s contention is clear: if Chelsea were willing to bend rules to secure a player of Hazard’s calibre, what chance did Spurs – who did not – really have in that market?
On the pitch, Hazard’s influence in 2016-17 was enormous.
He started 36 league games, scored 16 goals and delivered five assists. Only Cesar Azpilicueta played more often; only Diego Costa scored more, with 20. Hazard was Chelsea’s player of the year, made the PFA Team of the Year and was shortlisted for PFA Player of the Year.
Then there is the hard edge of his contribution: points.
Hazard scored the opener in a 2-1 win over West Ham in August. He added a goal and assist in a 2-0 victory against Southampton in November. In March he struck first again in another 2-1 win over West Ham, then scored both goals in a 2-0 triumph over Manchester City in April.
Those direct goal involvements underpinned four wins. You could reasonably argue they were worth 10 points.
That doesn’t mean Chelsea “bought” the 2016-17 title in the summer of 2016. Hazard was in his fifth season at Stamford Bridge by then. But the club had already banked the sporting advantage of winning that transfer battle years earlier – using payments now judged to have broken the rules.
Willian: the one that got away from Spurs
If Hazard symbolises Chelsea’s edge over Europe, Willian represents a more personal sore point for Tottenham.
The Brazilian joined from Anzhi Makhachkala in 2013. The investigation found transfer fee payments totalling £19.2m were made to two unregistered entities in connection with his move and that of Samuel Eto'o.
Willian was not a guaranteed starter in 2016-17. Nineteen of his 34 league appearances came from the bench. But his numbers still mattered: eight goals, eight assists.
Again, drill down to the decisive moments.
He set up the only goal in a 1-0 win at Sunderland in December. He scored twice in a 4-2 victory over Stoke later that month, then netted the opener in a 2-1 win at Stoke in March. In May, he assisted the winner in a chaotic 4-3 success over Watford.
Chelsea took eight points from those four games. Willian directly shaped all of them.
And here is the twist that stings Spurs fans: Chelsea snatched him at the last minute from under Tottenham’s noses. For a club now found to have made secret payments around his transfer, that leaves an obvious question hanging in the air.
Had everyone played by the same rules, would Willian have been lining up in Lilywhite instead of blue?
Luiz, Matic and the supporting cast
The investigation also uncovered payments totalling £5.1m between 2012 and 2015 for “talent identification services in certain European countries”. These were linked to the registrations of Ramires, Luiz, Schurrle and Matic.
By 2016-17, Luiz and Matic were both in their second spells at Chelsea. The 2011 deal with Benfica, which saw Matic and Luiz effectively swap clubs, was examined. Matic returned in 2014, Luiz came back from Paris St-Germain in 2016. The later deals themselves were not specifically charged, but the association is there in black and white.
On the pitch, both were pillars of Conte’s side.
Matic played 35 league games, starting 30, scoring once and providing seven assists. Only one of those contributions changed a result – but it was a big one: the assist for Chelsea’s first goal in a 2-1 win over Tottenham in November.
Luiz, named in the PFA Team of the Year, started 33 league matches and scored once, the opener in a 1-1 draw at Liverpool in January.
They were not the headline-grabbers like Hazard. Yet their presence, secured through a chain of deals linked to those irregular payments, helped give Chelsea a platform of stability and quality that very few sides could match.
Spurs’ near-perfection, Chelsea’s relentlessness
Strip away the emotion and the numbers from that season are still remarkable.
Tottenham finished with 86 points, winning 12 of their last 13 league games. It was a surge worthy of champions and remains a club record tally.
Conte’s Chelsea were just as ruthless. They won 11 of their last 13 to close on 93 points and the title.
Spurs’ total would have been enough to win the league in 2015-16, when Leicester finished on 81. Since 1999-2000, when Manchester United won it with 79 points, 86 would only have been enough twice – including the two most recent seasons.
Tottenham’s problem was the autumn. They went unbeaten in their first 11 league games, but only five were wins. Too many draws left them chasing.
Chelsea actually lost more matches – five to Spurs’ four – but they strung together 30 victories to Tottenham’s 26. That, ultimately, is where titles are usually decided.
Pochettino might argue that the extra attacking edge from Hazard and Willian, both signed in deals now stained by rule breaches, made the difference. Between them, their goals and assists swung eight different matches towards Chelsea.
Then there is the wider sporting advantage. Signing players like Hazard did not just win games; it won trophies, secured Champions League football and made Chelsea an even more attractive destination for the next wave of talent. That is the compound interest of breaking rules.
A title he never lifted – and a club that still loves him
Pochettino’s stance is not just about a line in a record book. It is about legacy.
He feels he should have a Premier League title to his name. His one season at Chelsea, in 2023-24, ended with a sixth-place finish and a fractured relationship with supporters. Neither party will reminisce fondly about it.
At Tottenham, it is different. The Argentine is still revered for his five-year spell from 2014 to 2019. He took Spurs to a Champions League final, pushed Leicester in 2015-16 and then Chelsea in 2016-17, and oversaw the club’s best Premier League points haul.
So do Spurs fans buy his argument?
"Of course I do," said Chris Paouros, co-founder and co-chair of Proud Lilywhites and Women of The Lane.
"He could tell me the moon was made of halloumi and I'd nod along.
"The Spurs 2016-17 team was the best in the league by most measures: best attack, best defence, fewest defeats, unbeaten at home in the last season of the old White Hart Lane.
"If the playing field was tilted, the least you can do is ask the question."
Paouros does not expect Spurs to be handed the title. But the principle matters.
The "rules have to mean something, whoever benefits," she said.
Would a retro title really feel like glory?
There is, inevitably, another side. What does a championship handed out a decade late really mean?
"It would still be something that Spurs fans would celebrate," said Tristan Foot, secretary of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters' Trust. "A victory over Chelsea, albeit 10 years after the event."
Yet the sense of injustice is not confined to north London.
"It means that to an extent crime does pay in football," Foot added. "And that's the serious underlying part all of this.
"During the transfer window they were signing players that we had no chance of winning, the obvious example being Willian.
"The Premier League has got to be better about imposing sporting sanctions and making sure that its rules actually have teeth."
With the Chelsea investigations now wrapped up, there will be no parade down the High Road for a retrofitted 2016-17 title. The table will not be rewritten.
But the questions Pochettino has dragged into the light are not going away.
When the Manchester City case finally ends, and the next financial scandal inevitably surfaces, will clubs still be left wondering whether the game’s biggest prizes are truly won on the pitch – or in the shadows of the transfer market?
