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Sensational claim refers to the 2016/17 Premier League season, when Spurs finished runners-up to their London rivals.

Mauricio Pochettino has made the remarkable claim that Chelsea should be stripped of their 2016/17 Premier League title, which he believes ought to be handed to Tottenham instead.

Chelsea were fined £10million by the Football Association (FA) in July and also given a suspended two-window transfer ban as punishment for 74 breaches of financial regulations between 2009 and 2022, during Roman Abramovich’s ownership of the club.

In March, they were further fined £10.75m by the Premier League and received a nine-month academy transfer ban. In 2023, UEFA also fined them £8.6m for “submitting incomplete financial information” between 2012 and 2019.

The charges were linked to agent regulations, rules governing work with intermediaries, and regulations concerning third-party investment in players.

Chelsea’s BlueCo consortium had self-reported the breaches after replacing Abramovich as the club’s new owners in 2022.

Pochettino, though, feels the sanctions did not go far enough. Tottenham ended the 2016/17 Premier League campaign in second place, seven points behind Antonio Conte’s Chelsea, and the club’s former manager believes the title should now be retrospectively awarded to Spurs.

“We should win one Premier League, we should have been awarded it,” said Pochettino, who is now in charge of the United States Men’s National Team (USMNT).

“If that [Chelsea’s breaches] 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.

“We can say that they scored goals, they won games. OK. But it’s completely fair to say that we didn’t compete before the start of the season with the same card.

“Maybe with the same rules, we could’ve signed some players that would have made the team better or scored more goals.”

Pochettino, who later managed Chelsea from 2023 to 2024, said: “I have no doubt and I’m not scared to say the truth.

“The Chelsea fans will be upset with me. But if we were at Tottenham and broke the rules, I’d admit the same: ‘We don’t deserve the title because we broke the rules’.

“It’s impossible if only some clubs play with offside and another plays with no offside, or one plays with VAR and another plays with no VAR. For everyone, it needs to be the same rules. And then you have the capacity to create the best team.

“I don’t say that Chelsea didn’t play well, that Conte was not great. I don’t say that. I don’t want the message to be twisted. But if you broke the rules then, ciao, you need to give it to another team. I don’t know why that didn’t happen.

“What is being promoted and incentivised is to break the rules. If you don’t punish in the way that you need to punish, I say: ‘Yeah, I lost my job [at Spurs] because we didn’t win a title.’”