Despite giving it all for Charlotte and the Carolina Panthers, former quarterback Cam Newton believes he was not valued properly by the team.

“I didn’t know at that time how to tell Carolina’s management, bro, that I’m that I’m disappointed, bro,” Cam Newton said on the “4th and 1” podcast. “I gave y’all everything, bro. I played when y’all know I wasn’t supposed to play, man. You know what I’m saying? I, man, I poked my body so many times with Toradol shots, man, just for this team, for this city, just to be able to be the person that y’all needed.

“I felt like a lab rat sometimes, but I didn’t complain. I ain’t cried. I ain’t sulked. Yeah, I took a hit with my image because I knew what I wanted to give the Carolina. I wanted to bring a Super Bowl to that city because nobody was able to do that. I wanted to bring the pride to be able to say, ‘I sacrificed my relationship with my kid. I sacrificed my relationship with my baby. I sacrificed so much.'”

Newton said that while addressing the topic of roster cuts, and how so many players will go through the stress of abandoning their dream of playing in the NFL.

The former Carolina Panthers QB hasn’t officially retired, by the way. In 2021, when the team released him, Newton said that he very much wanted to continue playing. However, no team made an offer, and 2020 remains the last year Newton stepped on the gridiron as a player. Since then, there seems to be some apparent beef between him and the team.

Newton has rarely visited the Bank of America Stadium since that last season. He claimed on the 4th&1 podcast that the Panthers gave a “b—-a– excuse like, ‘We don’t know if Cam retired or not,’ ” for keeping him away from the team. The Panthers have begun enshrining players into its Hall of Fame; Luke Kuechly has already been a finalist. But Newton doesn’t seem to be a prominent part of the franchise’s stance reagrding legacy players.

The former quarterback noted in 2023 that the stadium had no photos of him, despite him easily being Carolina’s best players (at least in the first half of his career).

Newton was valued enough by the Panthers to be selected as the 1st overall pick in the 2011 draft. He was a through-and-through athlete at the time, and came off a National Championship win and the Heisman Trophy. Newton reciprocated that with his dedication to the game: he notably played through injuries in 2014 and 2016. In 2015, he gave the Panthers what they wanted: a Super Bowl victory.

Newton’s 29,725 passing yards at Carolina top the career passing yards chart. He is followed by Jake Delhomme, who is more than 10,000 yards behind him. And yet, it is tough to say whether Newton would ever be formally honored by Carolina.

The franchise told The Athletic that its doors are always open for the former quarterback. However, it looks like both parties are icing each other out.

“I’ve been to some of those events where they’ve been like, ‘How can we get No. 1 back in the building? What do we need to do?’ They want him back around,” Captain Munnerlyn told The Athletic. “And this just ain’t regular people in the building. These are people who’ve got a say-so.

“If he was to tell his people underneath him, ‘Hey, I don’t care what it takes, I want Cam here right now,’ how easy would that be?” Harper said. “Honestly. ‘I’ll take my plane, I’ll pick him up.’ Just do it. I don’t think it’s that hard. I don’t think these mountains are that hard to move if you really want to move them.”