Mauricio Pochettino has reignited one of the biggest debates surrounding the 2016/17 Premier League season by arguing that Chelsea should be stripped of the title and the trophy awarded retrospectively to Tottenham Hotspur.
Pochettino was in charge of Spurs that season and led them to what remains one of the club’s strongest Premier League campaigns in modern history. Tottenham collected 86 points but finished seven behind Antonio Conte’s Chelsea, who secured the championship with 93.
Speaking in an interview with The Telegraph, the Argentine insisted the situation should now be reconsidered following punishment handed to Chelsea over historical breaches of football regulations.
“We should have been awarded it,” Pochettino said. “If that 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.”
His argument centres not on what happened on the pitch during the title race, but on whether the two clubs entered that competition operating under the same conditions.
Chelsea admitted to dozens of breaches of Football Association regulations relating to agents, intermediaries and third-party involvement in player transactions during the Roman Abramovich ownership era. The club was fined and handed a suspended transfer ban, but no retrospective sporting sanction was applied to the 2016/17 league campaign.
Although he acknowledged that Chelsea performed superbly under Conte and legitimately won matches on the field, the former Spurs manager argued that regulatory breaches could have affected the conditions under which squads were assembled.
“It’s not me complaining. It’s the truth,” Pochettino said, maintaining that Tottenham and Chelsea had not competed under equivalent circumstances.
He suggested that if Spurs had been operating under different financial or recruitment conditions, they might have been able to strengthen the squad further and potentially change the outcome of the title race.
His comments are particularly striking given his later relationship with Chelsea. Pochettino managed the Blues during the 2023/24 season before leaving the club by mutual consent, meaning his criticism is directed at a club he has represented as well as one of Tottenham’s fiercest London rivals.
Pochettino was also careful not to diminish Conte’s work or Chelsea’s performances during the campaign. Instead, his position is that sporting success should ultimately depend on all clubs respecting the same regulatory framework.
“If we were at Tottenham and broke the rules, I’d admit the same and say, ‘We don’t deserve the title because we broke the rules’,” he said.
He compared the issue to teams playing matches under different versions of the basic laws of football, arguing that meaningful competition requires the same standards to apply to everyone.
For now, Pochettino’s comments amount to a personal call for retrospective action rather than any indication that the Premier League intends to rewrite the 2016/17 standings.
Chelsea remain officially recognised as the champions of that season, and there has been no announcement that the Premier League is considering transferring the title to Tottenham.
The punishment imposed over Chelsea’s historical conduct has instead centred on financial penalties and transfer-related sanctions. Chelsea’s current ownership also disclosed historical irregularities after taking control of the club from Abramovich in 2022, a factor considered during the regulatory process.
Nevertheless, Pochettino’s intervention has reopened the wider question of how football authorities should deal with historical rule breaches when they overlap with periods of major sporting success.
Tottenham’s 2016/17 side finished with the club’s highest points total of the Premier League era at the time and lost only four league matches all season. Yet they ended the campaign without silverware.
Nearly a decade later, Pochettino believes history should record that season differently.
His position is simple: if one contender is subsequently found to have broken regulations that the other respected, a fine alone does not fully address the competitive consequences.
Whether football’s governing bodies agree with that interpretation is another matter. As things stand, Chelsea’s 2017 crown remains untouched; but Pochettino has made it clear that, in his view, Tottenham should be able to call themselves Premier League champions.
