Mark Hughes opens the door to one of the meeting rooms at Stoke City's training ground and points towards a couple of chairs bathed in sunshine. It was a little more than two months ago that he was named as Tony Pulis's successor but the 49-year-old already looks like a man totally at ease in his new surroundings. "That's credit to what's in place here," Hughes says. "Maybe I'm getting it wrong but I just think there's a real sense that people want me to do well."

Outside the football club, some Stoke supporters still need convincing that the Welshman is the right man for the job. Hughes insists he is not fazed by that situation and talks about how he hopes the brand of "dynamic and progressive" football he is planning to introduce at the Britannia Stadium "will turn a few around".

On the face of it, his record in the dugout stacks up. Hughes is one of only 25 managers who have taken charge of more than 200 Premier League games and his win ratio puts him a credible 10th on the list, above Sam Allardyce and Roy Hodgson.

He led Blackburn Rovers – a club where he sees clear parallels with Stoke – to three successive top-10 finishes and took Fulham to eighth spot. In between times he was sacked by Manchester City when the club were sixth, one place lower than they finished at the end of that season under Roberto Mancini. But the stain on the CV is the disastrous 10-month reign at Queens Park Rangers last year that did not so much damage his record as destroy his reputation.

"I'd like to think people would see the bigger picture but I can understand why they don't, because probably after QPR I think a lot of people had made their mind up that I was the root of all evil and I was the reason why the club went down last season," says Hughes, who had kept the club up the previous year. "I was there for the first 12 games, we didn't lose them all, we lost a fair percentage of them. In the first 12 games we played eight of the teams that finished in the top 10, so it was a difficult start. But you have to win football matches and if you don't, you allow people to criticise you."

There was no shortage of flak, including from Neil Warnock, the manager Hughes replaced at Loftus Road in January 2012. When Warnock stepped down as the Leeds United manager towards the end of last season, at a time when Hughes was being linked with the job at Elland Road, he said: "I personally hope Mark Hughes follows me again and destroys another team of mine."

Hughes has kept his counsel until now. "Neil, I think, sometimes engages in what he would say is banter that will get a reaction. I think that was one of those occasions where he engaged his mouth before his brain. He was probably trying to make a joke but the insinuation was still there, so I thought it was unnecessary.

"I try when I go into places not to belittle what's gone before, because I know how difficult it is to manage and everybody does it differently. But there were certain elements that I inherited [at QPR] that didn't make my job any easier, but I never came out and actually said it. Whereas maybe Neil is a personality that feels he has to do things like that to protect his own image."

One of the main criticisms of Hughes at QPR surrounded the transfer strategy that saw huge wages paid to players who massively underperformed. "Results weren't good enough, so in that regard I can accept the criticism," Hughes says. "But a lot of things were put at my door in terms of trying to put the club's future at risk by my transfer policy. Everyone signed up for that, the owners, the chairman, myself, the coaching staff, and felt that would be the right decision for the club, so a number of people were complicit in what happened at QPR. Invariably the manager will take the brunt of it, but a lot of it, I felt, was unfair."

That is not to say Hughes is absolving himself of blame. He went through a long period of "self-reflection" after his sacking and says that his overriding regret is that he allowed himself to be too detached from the players at QPR. "I was spread a little bit too thin and I lost my focus in terms of the importance of being the manager of the club, which is basically to get performances out of my players. My relationship with the group – which was a difficult group – wasn't as good as it possibly could have been and that compounded the problems I had."

Hughes admits there was a danger that he would be viewed by some clubs as damaged goods after his experience at QPR – a situation he concedes is quite a turnaround for a man who was being linked with jobs at Chelsea and Tottenham not so long ago. "Sometimes you make decisions that affect you," he says. "I think at Fulham, with hindsight – and that is a wonderful thing in football – I shouldn't have left when I did [in 2011]. I had been offered a three-year contract and I felt it would have been wrong for me to commit to three more years when I thought maybe the club was going in a direction that I couldn't go. As it was, I probably misinterpreted the signs [within Fulham] that I had at the time."

Hughes doubted Fulham's ambition, which was something Kia Joorabchian, his representative, confirmed after the manager's resignation. It has seemed strange to many people that Hughes, who comes across as a thoughtful and erudite man, has formed a close relationship with Joorabchian, an agent who has been no stranger to controversy and whose role at QPR came under question. "The perception was that Kia was doing all the deals at QPR; he wasn't," Hughes says.

"Kia is a personal friend. We first came together at Man City, and the players that he brought to the club were the likes of Carlos Tevez. More often than not he brings value to a club by virtue of the contacts he has. I'm sure in the future there will be opportunities, if I feel it's right for the club, that he may be involved in players that come here. But he hasn't to this point and he wasn't involved in my deal here."

During talks with the Stoke board, Hughes says the team's style of play was never mentioned. He accepts, though, that there is a natural assumption Stoke will be easier on the eye under him and, at the very least, carry a greater goal threat. Stoke failed to average a goal per game in the Premier League under Pulis and had the lowest number of shots in each of those five seasons. Their net spend over that period was £80m.

Hughes has no intention of criticising Pulis's methods – he points out that his Blackburn side were "falsely accused of being over-physical and I think that's been labelled at Stoke on occasions" – and acknowledges that five successive seasons of Premier League football is not to be dismissed. There is, however, no doubt that he has a different vision for how Stoke will play, with or without the additional new faces he hopes to bring in before the window closes.

"The perception is that the Stoke players were one-dimensional, that they could only play in a certain way and that was the top and bottom of their capabilities," he says. "It's plainly obvious to me, having worked with them for six weeks, that they're more than capable of a lot more than that."

A trip to Liverpool on the opening day is not the easiest place for a former Manchester United player to start a new job, although Hughes has always thrived on Anfield's atmosphere. "I love going back, I think it's one of the great arenas in sport. You know you're going to get dog's abuse on occasions and sometimes you get wags behind you that say things that make you chuckle inside. But we're really looking forward to this game, we're going to have huge support and we've got to give them something to cheer."