Alan Pardew has opened up about his time in charge of Newcastle United, expressing frustration that he was never fully embraced by the club's fanbase despite spending four years at the helm and collecting two manager of the year awards.

The former manager believes the atmosphere around the club during his tenure turned sour, and he has pointed to a combination of factors — including dressing room tensions and a hostile local media — as contributors to an environment that became increasingly difficult to operate in.

Barton's words and a divided dressing room

Pardew recalled being told by Joey Barton that he was unwanted at the club, a remark that underlines how fractured relations between the manager and certain players had become. Those internal conflicts, Pardew suggests, fed into a wider narrative that made it hard for supporters to rally behind him.

Despite the internal turbulence, Pardew guided Newcastle to results that earned him recognition at the highest level of English football management. Yet, he maintains, those achievements were consistently overshadowed by the noise surrounding the club.

Media pressure and fan relations

Pardew has been candid about the role the local press played in shaping public opinion against him. He feels the coverage was rarely sympathetic and served to deepen the divide between himself and the supporters. Rather than acting as a bridge, the media — in his view — amplified tensions that might otherwise have remained contained.

Newcastle's fanbase is among the most passionate in English football, and Pardew acknowledges that. However, he argues that passion was never directed his way in a positive sense, leaving him feeling isolated despite the work being done on the pitch and in the training ground.

A legacy still in dispute

Four years, two awards, and yet Pardew departed St. James' Park with his reputation in the north-east firmly in the negative. He remains a figure who divides opinion — celebrated in some quarters for stabilising the club through a turbulent ownership era, and criticised in others for results that fell short of expectation.

Whether history will be kinder to Pardew's Newcastle chapter remains to be seen. For now, the man himself clearly feels that the full picture of his time on Tyneside has never been fairly told.