Concerns raised about Jonathan Morgan prior to Maddy Cusack’s death, inquest told

The former Sheffield United goalkeeper Nina Wilson has told an inquest that she had “tried to escalate concerns” about the manager Jonathan Morgan prior to her teammate Maddy Cusack’s death in 2023, but she did not feel she was listened to.

Wilson, who told the hearing that she had ended her own football career when she was aged 25 because of those experiences, said that neither she nor Cusack had known who the club’s safeguarding officer was, and she listed a series of recommendations to the court, including calling for whistleblowing routes to be clearer to players and for mental health education to be a mandatory part of coaching qualification courses.

However, later in Friday’s hearing, another former Sheffield United player and Morgan’s former assistant coach Luke Turner told the court that they had never witnessed Morgan bullying Cusack or any other players personally. The former Leicester City, Burnley and Sheffield United manager Morgan, who will give evidence to the inquest on Monday, asked his former player Naomi Hartley if she had seen any bullying towards Cusack, and Hartley replied: “No, I just think a lot of people were intimidated by you.”

Chesterfield coroner’s court also heard evidence of how under-resourced staff felt at the second-tier club during the summer of 2023 as they transitioned from part-time to full-time status. The club’s women’s team doctor at the time, Dr Subhashis Basu, said they had been so stretched that at one stage Basu had to organise the booking of a pitch for training, collect “lunch for the players from Tesco” and even “store medication” in his house, having also referenced a frequent lack of access to private medical rooms for the women’s squad.

Dr Basu added: “It was an extremely challenging environment. We were routinely moving training facilities, struggling to find venues.”

Wilson, who played for an extensive list of clubs including Brighton and London City Lionesses, told the court the death of her friend Cusack, aged 27 on 20 September 2023, was “definitely preventable”. She labelled Cusack as “an exceptionally confident person, she was so funny, always bouncing around the changing room, checking in on other people”, but said she had noticed a “very stark change” in her demeanour from February 2023, when Morgan was appointed.

Wilson said she had raised issues about Morgan to the club but said: “They didn’t go anywhere. The answer I was getting was ‘he’s the manager’.” The exact details and nature of her complaint were not disclosed in court. Sheffield United commissioned their own investigation into Cusack’s death in 2023 which found no wrongdoing. Senior club staff will give evidence to the court next week.

Wilson said, within the dressing room, the “only person that said positive things about Morgan’s appointment” was the captain, Sophie Barker, who gave evidence to the inquest on Wednesday. Wilson claimed Morgan had “created divisions” in the team, “made everyone on edge” and made a small group of players who were not starting games train alone, away from the other players.

Turner, who currently works as the assistant manager at the Women’s Super League 2 side, was asked about that claim in court and said that he “did not recall” Morgan ever making players train in such a way. Turner also said that he had never personally heard Cusack question Morgan’s behaviour. When asked if anyone had raised issues about Morgan being appointed in early 2023, Turner replied: “The only things I’d heard were someone had said he ‘wasn’t the greatest coach on the pitch’ from the tactical perspective, but I didn’t hear anything else.”

Turner also appeared to concur with Basu’s evidence about the stretched staffing resources in the summer of 2023, a period when Turner was temporarily away from the club while serving his notice period on another job so that he could join Sheffield United on a full-time basis. He said, when asked about the staff: “There were very limited numbers of staff there at that point. The staff remaining were having to do multiple roles, and all trying and do the best they could.”

Turner also said he had been the person who flagged concerns to Morgan and the team’s physio, Francesca Carr, about Cusack being in a low mood, which Morgan and Carr then raised with Basu. Basu said that, during a call on 6 September 2023, Cusack had “presented to me as someone who was overwhelmed and needed time to think about things”. He said he had assessed that she was at a “low risk of suicide” but at a “high risk of deterioration”.

Hartley, a former teammate of Cusack, said the late midfielder was “a happy person” who “lit up every room she went into” and “was a shoulder to cry on who always listened”. Of her experiences of Morgan, Hartley added: “If you’re on his good side, you’re fine, if you’re on his bad side, you’re not,” but she conceded she had never seen him bully anybody.

The inquest also heard evidence from Nardia O’Connor, a mental health and wellbeing expert whom Cusack’s family, David, had independently asked to help his daughter, when the family were concerned about her in early September 2023. O’Connor said Cusack had been “clearly struggling with juggling” the pressures of her marketing job with the club combined with her full-time football contract, and that Cusack had mentioned worries about “a financial commitment with her house”.

The inquest continues on Monday and is scheduled to continue until 10 July.