Newcastle rejected future Premier League and Champions League winner because he 'wasn't good enough'

Today at 08:16 AM

Alan Pardew has recalled being denied the chance to sign a future Premier League and Champions League winner while he was Newcastle boss.

Pardew was appointed as the new Newcastle manager in December 2010 as their replacement for Chris Hughton.

He moved to Tyneside after a spell in League One with Southampton, who had the up and coming Adam Lallana within their ranks.

The then 21-year-old attacking midfielder scored 15 league goals in the 2009/10 season and netted another five in all competitions.

Pardew was unsurprisingly impressed and was keen to reunite with him at Newcastle, but the Magpies did not allow the move to happen.

Speaking on talkSPORT, he commented on the importance of clubs ‘headhunting’ the ‘very best’ players from lower divisions when they have been promoted to the Premier League.

“When you’ve now got this new technical development team, they suddenly go and find all these stats from a guy who’s at Belgium, who’s actually just got 32 assists and 18 goals,” he said.

“They go, ‘Oh, he’s got to be better than that fella at Preston.’ And you’re going, ‘Hmm, not so sure about that by the way.’ I’ll give you an example of exactly what happened at Newcastle. When I went into Newcastle, I just managed at Southampton.

“They said to me, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I want Adam Lallana here now, get Adam Lallana here now.’ The team that they had there, the scouting team at the time, said to me, ‘He’s not good enough for Newcastle.

“‘He may be good enough for Southampton, but he’s not good enough for this football club.’ So there’s a kind of example and we didn’t take it! I mean, he was in his prime… Can you imagine if we had taken him?”

“And they said that based on what?” asked host Jim White, and Pardew replied: “They based that on the fact that I was going to the Premier League and he was two divisions below.

“My argument, and this is a little lesson for all technical directors, if you’ve actually worked with the player, you know. And I’d been to the Premier League so I knew the quality.

“[Yossi] Benayoun, Teddy Sheringham, [Carlos] Tevez, I knew what it takes to be a Premier League player. So, to actually put that down on me, I was a little bit like, ‘Ooh, really? Okay’.”

Pardew was then asked about his response to the rejection was like and he said: “Not very good actually, not very good at all.

“And I kept pushing for it, and I pushed it for the next window as well, he was still there.”

Lallana left Southampton in 2014, four years after Pardew departed, and signed for Liverpool.

He scored 22 goals and assisted another 22 in 178 appearances across all competitions for the Reds, collecting a huge haul of silverware.

During his six-year stint at Anfield, Lallana won the Premier League, the Champions League, the UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup.

Brighton signed him on a free transfer in 2020 before he returned to Southampton in June, making six appearances so far this season.