Pochettino's Claim: Should Spurs Be Champions of 2016-17?

Mauricio Pochettino believes he should already be a Premier League-winning manager. Not with Manchester City. Not with Chelsea. With Tottenham Hotspur. And specifically, with the 2016-17 side that chased down Antonio Conte’s Chelsea and fell seven points short.

His argument is simple and incendiary: if Chelsea have admitted to breaking the rules, why are Spurs not champions?

This all stems from the Premier League’s investigation into Chelsea’s £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties between 2011 and 2018. Those payments helped secure some of the club’s biggest modern-era signings: Eden Hazard, Samuel Eto’o, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, Andre Schurrle and Nemanja Matic.

Four of them – Hazard, Willian, Luiz and Matic – were central figures in the 2016-17 title-winning campaign. Two of them, Pochettino can fairly say, tilted the race.

Chelsea have already been punished. Fines from Uefa, the Premier League and the Football Association are on the record. No points deductions. No stripped titles. No asterisks in the official roll of honour.

For Pochettino, that is nowhere near enough.

“If they admitted they broke the rules, the Premier League title was for the second-best team,” he said.

It is one of the first times a high-profile figure has voiced publicly what many fans have muttered for months: Chelsea have escaped with a financial slap on the wrist while others have been hammered.

Everton and Nottingham Forest supporters hardly need reminding. Their clubs were docked points for relatively minor profit and sustainability breaches. Chelsea, by contrast, used covert payments while competing for elite players in the same market. The contrast bites.

And looming over all of it is the unresolved giant: Manchester City’s 115 charges for alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules. No verdict. No clarity. Just a sense that the sport’s rulebook is flexible for some and rigid for others.

So, does Pochettino really have a case? And how much did those four Chelsea players shape the 2016-17 title race?

Hazard: The Face of a Tarnished Era

Eden Hazard has become the emblem of the whole affair.

Chelsea beat most of Europe to sign him from Lille for £32m in 2012. The investigation found that, between May 2013 and August 2016, seven payments totalling £5.6m were made to an unregistered agent “for the benefit of the club in connection with Hazard’s transfer”.

Pochettino’s point is not that Hazard alone won Chelsea the 2016-17 title. It’s that Spurs – and others – might have been able to sign players of similar calibre if they, too, had been willing to ignore the rules.

On the pitch, Hazard’s impact that season was enormous.

He started 36 league games, scored 16 goals and provided 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.

Strip away the awards and the numbers still hit hard. Look at the direct impact:

• He scored the opener in a 2-1 win over West Ham in August.
• He produced a goal and an assist in a 2-0 victory over Southampton in November.
• In March, he again struck first in another 2-1 win over West Ham.
• In April, he scored both goals in a 2-0 triumph over Manchester City.

You can reasonably argue that those contributions alone were worth around 10 points. Ten points in a title race decided by seven.

Hazard, though, was into his fifth season at Stamford Bridge by then. This was not a 2016 signing. The advantage had been building for years.

Willian: The One That Got Away From Spurs

Willian’s story stings Spurs even more.

Chelsea swooped in at the last minute in 2013 to sign him from Anzhi Makhachkala, hijacking a move that was all but done with Tottenham. The investigation found that transfer fee payments totalling £19.2m were made to two unregistered entities in connection with his move and that of Samuel Eto’o.

In 2016-17, Willian was not even a guaranteed starter. Nineteen of his 34 league appearances came off the bench. But when he did influence games, he did it decisively.

He finished with eight goals and eight assists in the Premier League. His attacking output changed the story of several matches:

• An assist in a 1-0 win at Sunderland in December.
• Two goals in a 4-2 win over Stoke later that month.
• The opener in a 2-1 victory over Stoke in March.
• An assist for the winner in a chaotic 4-3 win over Watford in May.

Those contributions helped secure eight points. Eight points that, in Pochettino’s eyes, should feel very different, given how Chelsea beat Spurs to his signature.

This is where the sense of “sporting advantage” becomes more than a phrase. It becomes tangible. A player Spurs had lined up, diverted by a club now found to have used secret payments in that era, then helping that same club edge them out in a title race.

Matic, Luiz and the Fine Margins

The investigation also highlighted 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, both Matic and Luiz were in their second spells at Chelsea. The original 2011 deal with Benfica, which effectively swapped Matic and Luiz, was scrutinised. Matic rejoined Chelsea in 2014, while Luiz returned in 2016 after two years at Paris St-Germain. The later deals were not specifically charged, but the association was clear.

On the pitch, both were pillars of Conte’s system.

Matic played 35 league games, starting 30. He scored once and registered seven assists. Only one of those directly changed a result – but it was a big one: an assist for Chelsea’s first goal in a 2-1 win over Tottenham in November.

Luiz, restored at the heart of a back three, started 33 league matches. He scored once – the opener in a 1-1 draw at Liverpool in January – and made the PFA Team of the Year.

These are the thin edges that decide a season. Spurs surged late, winning 12 of their final 13 games to finish on 86 points. Chelsea matched that relentlessness almost stride for stride, winning 11 of their last 13 to finish on 93.

Tottenham’s 86 points 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, a tally of 86 would only have been enough twice, including the two most recent seasons.

The damage for Spurs in 2016-17 came early. They went unbeaten in their first 11 league games – but only five of those were wins. Too many draws. Chelsea actually lost more matches overall, five to Spurs’ four, but they racked up 30 victories to Tottenham’s 26.

Pochettino can reasonably look at Hazard and Willian’s attacking contributions – decisive in eight different matches – and see the gap.

The Broader Advantage

This is about more than individual goals or assists. It is about what those signings enabled.

Hazard, Willian, Luiz, Matic and the rest did not just win Chelsea matches. They won trophies. They secured Champions League qualification. They made Stamford Bridge a magnet for more top talent. Success breeds success – and money, and prestige, and attraction.

Between 2011 and 2018, the period covered by the investigation, Chelsea won:

• Two Premier League titles (2014-15, 2016-17)
• Two FA Cups (2011-12, 2017-18)
• One EFL Cup (2014-15)
• The Europa League (2018-19)

Those honours sit in the cabinet. The question Pochettino poses is whether they were won on a fair field.

He, of all people, knows both sides of Chelsea. He lasted just one season as their head coach in 2023-24, never fully convincing supporters, and finished sixth. Neither party will cherish the memory.

At Tottenham, it is very different. The Argentine remains a cherished figure for his five-year spell from 2014. He delivered a Champions League final in 2018-19, a club-record 86-point league season in 2016-17 and a style of football that reconnected the fanbase with the team.

He believes that 86-point season should have ended with a Premier League trophy.

“Crime Does Pay in Football”

Among Spurs fans, there is little hesitation in backing him.

“Of course I do,” said Chris Paouros, co-founder and co-chair of Proud Lilywhites and Women of The Lane, when asked if she agreed with Pochettino. “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 is realistic. She knows Spurs will not be handed the title. The point, for her, is that “the rules have to mean something, whoever benefits”.

Tristan Foot, secretary of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust, goes a step further. Would fans celebrate a title awarded a decade late?

“It would still be something that Spurs fans would celebrate,” he said. “A victory over Chelsea, albeit 10 years after the event.”

But the celebration would be laced with something darker.

“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.”

That line cuts through the noise. If rule-breaking only leads to fines, why would any superclub fear crossing the line?

No Parade, Plenty of Questions

The investigations into Chelsea are done. There will be no stripped titles, no revised honours list, no open-top bus rolling down Tottenham High Road with a 2016-17 trophy.

Pochettino will not get the Premier League crown he feels he earned. Spurs will not see that glorious, relentless side immortalised as champions. The official record will always say Chelsea, 93 points, winners.

But the sense of injustice lingers – in north London, in Merseyside, in Nottingham and beyond.

And with Manchester City’s 115 charges still unresolved, another storm is waiting. When that saga finally ends, will clubs feel the same hollow mix of vindication and frustration?

Or will English football finally decide that, when it comes to its biggest prizes, the rules really do have teeth?