Should Chelsea be stripped of the 2016-17 title?
BBC Sport – Chelsea vs Tottenham: Who should be crowned champions?
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Premier League: Chelsea’s title under scrutiny
Can you make a case for Chelsea being stripped of the 2016-17 title?
Image source: Getty Images
Image caption: Chelsea signed Eden Hazard from a string of other clubs by paying £5.6m to an unregistered agent
By Dale Johnson, Football issues correspondent
Published 17 minutes ago
Should Tottenham be retrospectively crowned Premier League champions for the 2016-17 season? That’s the opinion of former manager Mauricio Pochettino, who led Spurs to a second-place finish – seven points behind Chelsea – that season.
This revolves around Chelsea making £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties to seal transfers between 2011 and 2018. The transfers included Eden Hazard, Samuel Eto’o, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, Andre Schurrle, and Nemanja Matic. Four of those – Hazard, Willian, Luiz, and Matic – were at the club in 2016-17.
During that period, Chelsea won:
- Two Premier League titles (2014-15 and 2016-17)
- Two FA Cups (2011-12 and 2017-18)
- The EFL Cup (2014-15)
- The Europa League (2018–19)
Chelsea have been fined by Uefa, the Premier League, and the Football Association, but Pochettino thinks that’s not enough.
"If they admitted they broke the rules, the Premier League title was for the second-best team," Pochettino said.
Pochettino is among the first to voice what many feel – that Chelsea got off lightly with a fine. Fans of Everton and Nottingham Forest have pointed out that their clubs faced points deductions for relatively small profit and sustainability breaches, while Chelsea sought to sign star players with secret payments.
Meanwhile, there’s no sign yet of a verdict in the case of Manchester City’s 115 charges for alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules.
Does Pochettino have a point? And how much impact did those four players have on the title race?
Hazard – the player everyone wanted.
Hazard (pictured) is seen as the poster boy for Chelsea’s breaches. The Blues fought off most of Europe’s top clubs to sign him from Lille for £32m in the summer of 2012. 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 argument is that Spurs could have beaten other clubs to the signing of players of similar ability had they also ignored the rules.
Hazard’s impact in the 2016-17 season was considerable.
The Belgium forward started 36 Premier League games, scored 16 goals, and provided five assists. Only Cesar Azpilicueta started more matches, and only Diego Costa netted more goals (20). Hazard was Chelsea’s player of the year, named in the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) team of the year, and made the shortlist for PFA player of the year.
Then there’s the direct impact of his goals and assists in the results of four fixtures:
- Hazard scored the first goal in a 2-1 win over West Ham in August.
- He scored a goal and provided an assist in a 2-0 victory over Southampton in November.
