Pochettino Questions Spurs' Claim to 2016-17 Title
Mauricio Pochettino has never lifted the Premier League trophy. Now he’s asking if, on paper at least, he already should have.
The former Tottenham manager believes Spurs ought to be retrospectively crowned champions for the 2016-17 season, after Chelsea admitted to making £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties between 2011 and 2018.
“If they admitted they broke the rules, the Premier League title was for the second-best team,” Pochettino said.
In 2016-17, that “second-best team” was his Spurs side, seven points behind Antonio Conte’s Chelsea.
Chelsea’s Hidden Payments – And Their Core Cast
The Premier League investigation detailed covert payments linked to a series of Chelsea transfers: Eden Hazard, Samuel Eto'o, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, Andre Schurrle and Nemanja Matic.
Four of them – Hazard, Willian, Luiz and Matic – were all at Stamford Bridge in 2016-17, the season Chelsea finished with 93 points and the title, while Tottenham’s 86-point haul set a club record but brought nothing more tangible than pride.
Across the period in question, Chelsea collected a formidable haul: two Premier League titles (2014-15 and 2016-17), two FA Cups (2011-12 and 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, like many looking at the numbers and the silverware, thinks that isn’t close to enough.
He has become one of the first high-profile figures to say out loud what plenty have been muttering: Chelsea, compared with others, got off lightly.
Everton, Forest, City – And A Sense Of Double Standards
Everton and Nottingham Forest supporters have been quick to draw the contrast. Their clubs suffered points deductions for profit and sustainability breaches that look minor set against a scheme of secret payments designed to secure elite players.
Chelsea, the argument runs, used those undeclared sums to strengthen squads, win trophies and lock in Champions League revenue – the kind of sporting and financial cycle others could only watch.
At the same time, the Premier League’s most explosive case remains unresolved. Manchester City still face 115 charges for alleged breaches of financial rules, with no verdict in sight.
So Pochettino’s question lands hard: if rules are broken and titles stay put, what exactly is the deterrent?
Hazard: The Headline Act
Hazard has become the poster boy for the Chelsea case.
Chelsea beat a pack of European giants to sign him from Lille for £32m in 2012. Between May 2013 and August 2016, the investigation found seven payments totalling £5.6m made to an unregistered agent “for the benefit of the club in connection with Hazard’s transfer”.
Pochettino’s claim is simple: if Spurs had been willing to ignore the rules in the same way, they might have been able to sign players of similar calibre. Instead, they watched from the outside as Chelsea armed themselves with one of the league’s most decisive footballers.
In 2016-17, Hazard’s impact was enormous. He started 36 league games, scored 16 goals and laid on five assists. Only Cesar Azpilicueta started more matches, only Diego Costa scored more league goals (20).
He was Chelsea’s player of the year, made the PFA team of the year and was shortlisted for PFA Player of the Year. This was not a peripheral figure.
Look at specific games and his influence sharpens. He opened the scoring in a 2-1 win over West Ham in August. Against Southampton in November, he scored one and assisted the other in a 2-0 victory. In March, he again struck first in another 2-1 win over West Ham. In April, he scored both goals in a 2-0 victory over Manchester City.
Those direct contributions alone were worth around 10 points. In a title race decided by seven, that is not a trivial margin.
Yes, 2016-17 was Hazard’s fifth season at Chelsea. The club did not sign him that summer. But the argument is about the original advantage – how a rule-breaching transfer years earlier still echoed into that title run.
Willian: The One That Got Away From Spurs
If Hazard symbolises the investigation, Willian embodies the Tottenham grievance.
Chelsea signed him from Anzhi Makhachkala in 2013. The investigation found transfer fee payments totalling £19.2m to two unregistered entities in connection with his and Samuel Eto’o’s moves.
In 2016-17, Willian was not a nailed-on starter. Nineteen of his 34 league appearances came from the bench. Yet his numbers still mattered: eight goals, eight assists.
Four matches, in particular, swung on his output. He set up the winner in a 1-0 victory at Sunderland in December. He scored twice in a 4-2 win over Stoke that same month, then opened the scoring in a 2-1 win at Stoke in March. In May, he provided the assist for the decisive goal in a 4-3 thriller against Watford.
Eight points, heavily stamped with his name.
The sting for Spurs fans is obvious. Chelsea swooped in at the last minute to sign Willian from under Tottenham’s nose. Given what we now know, Spurs can argue that only Chelsea’s willingness to operate outside the rules allowed that hijack to happen.
Luiz, Matic And The Web Of Advantage
The investigation also uncovered payments totalling £5.1m between 2012 and 2015, labelled as fees “to provide 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 the club. The original 2011 deal with Benfica, which effectively swapped Matic and Luiz, came under scrutiny. Matic returned in 2014, Luiz came back from Paris St-Germain in 2016. The subsequent returns were not directly cited in the findings, but the association was firmly drawn.
On the pitch in 2016-17, Matic played 35 league games, starting 30. He scored once and supplied seven assists. Only one of those attacking contributions directly altered a result – the assist for Chelsea’s first goal in a 2-1 win over Tottenham in November.
Luiz, named in the PFA team of the season, started 33 league matches and scored once – the opener in a 1-1 draw at Liverpool in January.
These weren’t just names on a charge sheet. They were pillars in a title-winning side.
Spurs’ Near-Perfection, Chelsea’s Ruthless Edge
Strip away the emotion and the numbers still tell a story of a fierce title race.
Tottenham were ferocious in the run-in. They won 12 of their final 13 league games, finishing on 86 points. That total would have been enough to win the league in 2015-16, when Leicester took the title with 81.
Since 1999-2000, when Manchester United were champions with 79 points, 86 points would only have been good enough for the title twice – including the two most recent seasons.
But Conte’s Chelsea matched Spurs’ relentlessness and then some, winning 11 of their final 13 and ending on 93 points. They lost more matches overall – five to Spurs’ four – but racked up 30 wins to Tottenham’s 26.
Spurs’ problem came earlier. An 11-game unbeaten start included six draws; the wins column simply didn’t fill quickly enough.
Pochettino can reasonably argue that the attacking thrust provided by Hazard and Willian in key moments tipped the balance. Between them, their decisive goals and assists changed results in eight different league games.
Overlay that with the broader sporting advantage – the ability to sign players like Hazard, win trophies, bank Champions League revenue and then attract even more elite talent – and his sense of injustice hardens.
A Manager Loved In One Half Of North London
Pochettino’s stance carries extra weight because of who he is to Tottenham.
His single season in charge of Chelsea, 2023-24, ended in a sixth-place finish and a mutual parting that neither side will cherish. He never truly won over the Stamford Bridge crowd.
In north London, it is very different. Spurs fans still revere him for his five-year spell from 2014 to 2019, a period that delivered the club’s best modern football and a Champions League final in 2018-19.
The 86 points of 2016-17 remain a Premier League club record. For many, that side felt like champions in all but name.
Do Spurs supporters back his view? “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 accepts that Spurs will not be handed the title, but insists the “rules have to mean something, whoever benefits.”
Would A Retro Title Even Matter?
There is a more awkward question. If a club is handed a title a decade late, does it carry real weight?
“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 anger isn’t just about Tottenham. It runs deeper through the league.
“It means that to an extent crime does pay in football,” Foot added. “And that's the serious underlying part of all 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 closed, Pochettino is unlikely to get the parade he feels he earned. Spurs will almost certainly never see a 2016-17 title etched next to their name.
But the question lingers, and it stretches beyond Stamford Bridge and north London. When the Manchester City saga finally ends, will other clubs feel any more convinced that English football truly punishes those who cross the line – or will they be left asking the same thing all over again?
