Shortly after becoming Newcastle United's director of football last June, Joe Kinnear lost his mobile phone.

Perhaps it explains why a man who boasted of being able to call up any manager, any time, anywhere in the world with Arsène Wenger a particularly good pal, failed to make a single permanent player signing during his St James' Park tenure. Or maybe his replacement handset was constantly engaged and the contacts that mattered simply could not get through.

"Judge me on my signings," declared Kinnear eight months ago. Late on Monday night he resigned with just two loan deals – for Loïc Rémy last summer and Luuk de Jong last month – completed on his watch. Or sort of on his watch. The 67-year-old former Wimbledon and Newcastle manager did not actually meet Rémy until after the striker had joined from QPR.

Indeed Kinnear did not seem to do a great deal. Although Newcastle built him a lavish office he was rarely seen at the club and, despite much talk of the former Tottenham full-back undertaking scouting missions he tended to remain in north London, making the occasional trip to France, Belgium or Tyneside.

When he went to watch a game at Birmingham, he was reported to praise the left-sided performance of Shane Ferguson. It was then pointed out to Kinnear that Ferguson was a Newcastle player on loan with Lee Clark's side. That story has not been denied.

Asked if the club were capable of making permanent signings following Saturday's 3-0 home defeat to Sunderland, Pardew replied, eventually: "I've got no comment to make on that one."

Privately furious with Kinnear's failure to sign a replacement for Yohan Cabaye, who joined Paris Saint-Germain for £20m last week, a thoroughly fed-up looking Newcastle manager sent a not so subtle message to Mike Ashley, the club's owner.

"I'm a professional manager," said Pardew, who had been hoping to welcome Lyon's midfielder Clément Grenier, aka "the New Cabaye", to Tyneside. "If I was in charge, solely, of transfers things might be different. I think I've made my opinions very clear this week and all the rest is confidential."

Whether or not Pardew issued Ashley with a "him or me" ultimatum; whether the sports retailer reluctantly decided the friend he loved drinking with in Totteridge's Orange Tree pub in north London had become too much of a liability or whether, in a rare moment of self-awareness, Kinnear fell on his sword remains unclear.

Upset as Ashley will doubtless be over the Sunderland defeat, Newcastle stand eighth – not a bad achievement on the part of a manager who has not seen his squad refreshed by a new permanent signing in either of the last two transfer windows.

Or maybe the owner is less concerned about keeping Pardew onside than stemming an impending drop in season-ticket sales. Or even getting the club into the best possible shape for a sale. After all if he had really wanted to recruit Grenier rather than count the £20m Cabaye money, Ashley would surely not have been content to sit back and watch a key executive mess things up.

If the offer was right, there can surely be little doubt that he would sell Newcastle. Maybe Kinnear had come to be seen as an impediment to this ambition, his farcical presence turning a famous, widely loved club into an international laughing stock.

When the man who was forced to resign as Newcastle's manager due to ill health four years ago travelled to Tyneside on Monday for a meeting with Lee Charnley, the club's football secretary, the suspicion was that Kinnear was aiming to force through the sale of Papiss Cissé, the Senegal striker, to a club in either Turkey or Russia before those countries' transfer windows closed. Pardew had been vehemently opposed to the idea of selling Cissé but, clearly, the conversation quickly turned to the director of football's future at St James' Park. Not long before midnight he was gone.

In truth Kinnear's position had been untenable right from the moment in which he announced, unilaterally, the news of his appointment ahead of an official statement from St James' Park. And then gave a quite remarkable radio interview.

During a cringing on-air chat he mispronounced the names of several players – Cabaye was called Yohan Kebab – and claimed credit for signing the goalkeeper Tim Krul, who had been recruited by Graeme Souness.

Kinnear also called Derek Llambias, Newcastle's former managing director and a key Pardew ally, Derek "Lambezee". Moreover he claimed to be "more intelligent" than Newcastle fans and said he regarded criticism as "water off a duck's arse". Llambias resigned with immediate effect, leaving the always vulnerable Pardew to cut an isolated figure heavily tipped for the sack and seemingly on borrowed time.

Critics perhaps underestimated the streetwise Newcastle manager's ability to see Kinnear off. Crucially fans disillusioned by last season's relegation flirtation redirected their anger from the home dug-out to the directors' box, while Pardew also had the media and dressing room behind him.

Acutely conscious that a rare unguarded moment last May in which he had said Ashley "made mistakes" during the 2012-13 campaign possibly explains why the owner imposed Kinnear on him as a form of bizarre punishment, Pardew largely kept his own counsel, remaining circumspect when questioned about "Joe".

Meanwhile he watched bids for Bafétimbi Gomis, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Darren Bent, Florian Thauvin, Rémy Cabella and Grenier, among others, flounder and fail as Kinnear struggled to navigate his way around the intricacies of the modern global transfer market.

His performance compared woefully to that of Llambias, an accomplished deal sealer but although Llambais and Ashley are said to be back on good terms, it is thought unlikely that, for the moment at least, he will return. Instead Charnley and John Irving, the finance director, will continue to shoulder much of the managing director's old workload, leaving a vacuum at the top of the club.

If it adds credence to the feeling that Newcastle could shortly be under new ownership – although Ashley is impossible to second guess – Pardew will simply be relieved Kinnear is not around to put any prospective signings off. Or phone him up in the middle of a League Cup tie at Morecambe on a night when the former director of football had forgotten the first team were playing …