"I wanted to stay here but under the old regime it wasn't going to happen," Pennant said. "I would have left, without a shadow of a doubt, but the new manager came in and we talked and he just wanted to know, to hear from me, what had happened in the past. We went through it and he just said: 'That was not with me. You have talent, you are a good player,' which was what I wanted to hear.
"The club have been fantastic. They could easily have agreed with Tony Pulis and said: 'Yeah, we will call it a day.' In their eyes they are probably thinking they are taking a risk because they are a business as well so they don't want to pay that money to someone who is not worth it."
That is why Pennant was offered only a one-year deal, which he readily accepted. Now 30, Pennant has spent half his life in the spotlight - from when Arsenal decided to pay 2 million ($3.8 million) for him, making him Britain's most expensive teen.
There have been many mistakes, but it is hard not to conclude that a childhood spent in poverty on Nottingham's notorious Meadows Estate and marred by tragedy - his mother died from cancer when he was 3 - also had a profound effect.
"To get from there to where I am now is still an achievement," he says.
There are regrets but he has also fallen victim to his own reputation. Take the story, first published by the Spanish newspaper Marca in 2010, that he "forgot" he owned a Porsche car and left it at a railway station in Zaragoza for five months, accumulating eye-watering parking fines in the process. So was the story true?
"It was transfer deadline day, and Zaragoza called me and said they had a loan offer from Stoke," he says. "I had to be in England by 5pm so I rushed to the train station to get a train to the airport and then fly to Manchester."
The car stayed at the station for three weeks until Pennant got a friend to collect it and pay the fine. "It was blown out of all proportion but it's difficult to lose a bad reputation."
Pennant was in Spain having joined Real Zaragoza on a free transfer from Liverpool. He is still the only Englishman to feature in a Champions League final - in 2007 against Milan - without then playing for his country. At that time the winger was flying but then he was struck by injury, a double hernia and a stress fracture to his right tibia.
"I rushed back but I wasn't fully ready and I just could not get back into his [manager Rafael Benitez's] plans and from there I started to get a bit wobbly," Pennant says.
"You have to be very, very mentally strong and, at the time, I wasn't. I was naive, young. And that's when the wheels starting falling off ... It wasn't Liverpool's fault."
Now he has a second chance at Stoke, who are going through their own transition with a more expansive playing style under Hughes.
"It's put a smile back on our faces," Pennant admits. "It's what we all wanted, really, especially with the squad we have got. We all feel we should have been doing this sort of stuff before. Now we are allowed to express ourselves." Not that he is attacking Pulis. "Every manager has got ideas of his own, a style they want to play and he just felt that was defensively good, a good shape.
"His idea was maybe firstly not to lose, to be solid. Now maybe it's 'go out and win' ... It's like we have got 11 different players out there. But it's virtually the same squad."
Pennant has, mostly, been a substitute but his outlook now is very different.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it," he says. "But I will keep trying to force my way in and, hopefully, if he [Hughes] does want to change it then he will bring me in.
"Hopefully I've still got more than a few years left in the top flight. I want to achieve whatever I can with Stoke."
