Nina Wilson on Maddy Cusack’s tragic death and why she has quit playing: ‘It can happen again’

She speaks from the heart, as a close friend of Maddy Cusack, and starts to explain why she has taken the life-changing decision to walk away from her professional career.

“The game, as a whole, seems reluctant to change or accept criticism,” Nina Wilson tells The Athletic. “But if a player’s death is not a wake-up call for the entire game, I don’t know what is. Maddy would still be here if it wasn’t for football and the lack of support systems and, unless these issues are addressed properly, this will happen again.”

Wilson, 25, was a team-mate of Cusack’s at Sheffield United and, like her friend, there was a time when she was immensely proud to represent the club. “I feel like I was born to play football,” she says. “It has always been my passion. I played for the love of the game and I have always been so proud and grateful to be a professional player.”

Today, though, she is announcing that she has decided to quit playing because she is so disillusioned by how the club — and women’s football as a whole — have responded to Cusack’s death and the failures, she believes, that led to a previously happy 27-year-old taking her own life.

Wilson says she experienced the “worst six months of my life” after the appointment of Jonathan Morgan as the team’s manager. It left her, she says, “a shell of a person” and she gave evidence to that effect to the club-commissioned inquiry that, to the dismay of Cusack’s family, cleared Morgan of bullying or wrongdoing in relation to any player.

Nina Wilson was a popular figure among Sheffield United fans (Ashley Allen – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

Morgan, who denies causing Cusack’s emotional anguish, is now the subject of a Football Association investigation into an official complaint from her parents, David and Deborah, stating why they believe their eldest daughter “would still be with us had he not been appointed.” Morgan denies any form of bullying and says he is the victim of a witch hunt.

Wilson, a goalkeeper with more than 100 career appearances, says her own experiences of Morgan left her feeling “worthless and extremely isolated” in line with the initial investigation’s findings that he could divide opinion among the players.

Some found him caring and supportive. Others, including Wilson, reported that he could be divisive, even intimidating, and favoured certain players while ignoring and cold-shouldering others.

Wilson’s reasons for going public are mostly because “the lessons haven’t been learned and it is difficult to feel like anything is changing or that football, as a whole, wants to make things better.”

She wants to show solidarity with the Cusack family and, in doing so, she states:

• Other players are reluctant to speak out for fear of being “ostracised” when the culture of women’s football is, for the most part, aimed at promoting the sport
• The women’s game is not doing enough to provide external whistleblowing systems or help players through mental health issues, with no mandatory requirement for counsellors and psychologists to be made available
• Pressures are increased because women footballers are often so badly paid they have to take on extra jobs, working punishing hours to the detriment of their playing careers
• Sheffield United have “failed” Cusack’s family by ignoring a fan-led petition urging the club to ‘retire’ her No 8 shirt.

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In ordinary circumstances, Wilson would be approaching the peak years of a playing career that has featured spells at London City Lionesses, Watford, Lewes and her hometown club, Brighton & Hove Albion.

These, however, are not ordinary circumstances and she has decided to give up playing, after seven years as a professional, for as long as “football has its head in the sand and no one cares enough to want to change anything.”

Wilson has not tried to find another club since becoming a free agent in the summer. It has been her own choice and one of the reasons, she says, is that it would be harder to speak freely if she was still involved in the sport.

“When I found out about Maddy, the first thing that multiple members of the team said was that ‘it could have been any of us.’

“As awful as it sounds, they were the direct conversations that were happening after Maddy died. There was a group of us who said it could have happened to us. Those players, including Maddy, regarded it as the worst times we had ever had in football and couldn’t have been in a darker place.

“We’d been made to feel like we weren’t worth anything. It felt like we didn’t matter as people any more. Some of us just went off the radar and barely spoke for weeks and months on end. You could go into training and not be acknowledged by anyone all day.”

Morgan took the Sheffield United job in February 2023, despite the club’s then head of women’s football, Zoe Johnson, emailing her colleagues during the selection process to warn them that, although she believed he was a good coach, he “doesn’t have a great reputation” within women’s football.

Jonathan Morgan was accused of bullying at Sheffield United (Steve Bardens – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

His appointment coincided with Cusack losing her place as an automatic starter in a team where she was a fans’ favourite. She had played for Morgan before at Leicester City and, according to her family, it had left her with the clear impression that he disliked her.

Wilson says she saw, close up, how her team-mate became “nervous and withdrawn” in Morgan’s presence and no longer seemed her usual self.

“Maddy was always a massive leader in the team and such a confident person – that changed almost overnight.

“She tried so hard to please him and do what was right by the team. She still trained hard, doing extra running and fitness sessions. If we ever asked, ‘You OK, Mads?’ she would turn it back in typical Maddy fashion, as if she was more worried about others. ‘Just getting my head down,’ she’d say, ‘are you OK, though?’

“Both of us were in a very similar position whereby we couldn’t be ourselves any more. We couldn’t be that bubbly, confident person. The whole culture (under Morgan) had shifted massively. It was very divisive and it made no sense because, just a few months before, we were a really close team and all really good friends.

“That’s what I loved about being there. I loved Sheffield and I loved being at the club. But a lot of us just shut down and stopped talking. We didn’t know who we could trust any more. It made it a horrible environment and if you tried to bring up issues with other people at the club you were either pushed further out or laughed off. The response was, ‘Well, he’s the manager.’

“Anyone who dared to speak out was completely frozen out. Other staff and players would walk past and not even acknowledge you. You felt like you were invisible, like you didn’t really matter. Multiple players, including myself and Maddy, were made to feel this way. We were seasoned players. We’ve all been dropped before; that’s just football. What’s not acceptable is to put people down so much they feel they have no value as a person.”

In Wilson’s evidence to the club inquiry, seen by The Athletic, she states Morgan went out of his way to blank her and recalled how unhappy it made her, as a hard-working player with no disciplinary issues, when she reported back from a loan spell at Wolverhampton Wanderers and was informed she was not welcome to train with the rest of the squad. Morgan, she says, “made that decision without ever even talking to me… I’d never even met him.”

Nina Wilson made over 100 career appearances (Charlotte Tattersall – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

She moved to Scotland in the summer of 2023 to join Hibernian for “a new start … to help me get that bubbly, upbeat person back.” However, she had been at her new club only a few weeks when she took the telephone call that turned her world upside down.

“Maddy was gone,” she says. “I got the call while I was in my car before training and I already knew, without anyone having to tell me, that it was because of football.”

Cusack, a former England Under-19 international, was United’s vice-captain and longest-serving player as well as working as a marketing executive in the club’s commercial department. She had previously played for Leicester, Birmingham City and Aston Villa, having come through the youth systems of Nottingham Forest and Chesterfield.

Fourteen months after her friend’s death, Wilson believes there needs to be much better support systems in place for players who need emotional and psychological help. It saddens her that “every club should be learning from Maddy’s death but, rather than looking at themselves, they would rather believe it was an one-off tragedy that won’t happen again.

“I think it will happen again. And I know the family think it will happen again. So, are we just going to wait for that to happen? Does someone else need to lose their life? Because that’s what I ask myself every day.”

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What many people might find shocking is how little, on average, players earn in the top two divisions, the Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship, and how that can add to the pressures that already exist from working in a highly competitive environment. Wilson had to find other ways to supplement her £6,000-a-year income, taking a job with the club’s community foundation as well as doing bar work in the evenings.

It could be gruelling keeping down three jobs, especially at a time when the demands on players were higher than ever before. But that, she says, is one of the realities of the women’s game for many players.

“The demands continue to increase, and so do the pressures, but the wages don’t, the provisions don’t and the player care doesn’t,” says Wilson. “We (the players) are the ones taking the hit for how much the profile of the game is growing. You’re earning the bare minimum in some cases but you’re made to feel you should be grateful for whatever you can get. It’s very easy to end up in a dark place and think, ‘What’s the point? Why have I given up everything for this?’”

Against that backdrop, it can seem strange and unsatisfactory to Cusack’s family and friends that a tragedy of this nature has not led to greater scrutiny of the women’s game.

“Most people (in the media) haven’t touched it,” says Wilson. “It (the coverage of women’s football) is all about ‘the image of the game.’ Nobody wants to make the game look bad. So nobody dares say anything and, if that comes at the detriment of the players, the people in higher positions seem OK with it.

“This should have been the main story of women’s football for months – not just in the week after Maddy died. This needs to upend everything in the game. We need to look at how we are failing players. It’s about the pressures that are put on players, the lack of support, the lack of available whistleblowing. It’s about making the game better and safer.”

Other players, she adds, have been “silenced more or less” by the culture of a fast-expanding sport or because of non-disclosure agreements similar to the one that prevents another former United player from speaking about her own complaint against Morgan’s alleged “bully-like behaviours.”

Morgan was sacked in February over revelations that he had a secret three-year affair with a teenage player while managing Leicester. He has said previously that he is confident the FA inquiry will exonerate him of any wrongdoing in relation to Cusack or any other United player.

Maddy Cusack’s death shook women’s football to its core (Ashley Allen – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

An inquest into Cusack’s death will be heard next year and, by going public, Wilson is making it clear she “doesn’t want Maddy’s family to feel they are alone in this fight.”

She is aware, because she was there herself, that nobody senior from the club’s hierarchy attended the vigil outside Bramall Lane on September 20 to mark the anniversary of Cusack’s death.

As for Cusack’s old shirt number, it seems remarkably hard-faced that the club have decided against retiring it despite a 1,200-name petition being raised by fans 11 months ago.

“There’s clearly resistance,” says Wilson, “and that resistance feels extremely unnecessary. Maddy was ‘Miss Sheffield United’. She lived and breathed the club and I don’t know who else could ever wear her shirt. It (retiring her number) seems such an obvious thing to do.”

Sheffield United and Morgan were approached for comment by The Athletic. 

An emotional Wilson was one of the speakers at the vigil, alongside Cusack’s youngest sister, Felicia, and used the occasion to urge her former club to rethink their position and understand “it sets a dangerous precedent to lose a member of our community and simply move on and forget, as it seems some organisations would like to.”

In a statement, United told The Athletic: “There is currently a Football Association investigation ongoing with regards to a number of the points raised. Sheffield United have fully co-operated in this regard and continue to respectfully await the outcome.”

The club say they are continuing “to grow and evolve, which includes transitioning from part-time to full-time” and that, as well as having a dedicated women’s safeguarding officer, a player-care officer and access to mental health first-aiders and wellbeing services, they have “further plans to strengthen the support staff.”

United also say they have had an external and independent whistleblowing service in place since 2018 with Safecall, the Sunderland-based firm that carried out the investigation into Morgan on the club’s behalf. Wilson, however, says that in her two years at the club she was never made aware of an external whistleblowing service for players.

Wilson is now on the committee of the MC8 charity foundation set up in her friend’s name. She had worn Cusack’s No 8 on her gloves at Hibernian and felt glad that, purely by coincidence, she had chosen 44 as her shirt number at the start of the season. “Maddy always supported me when I played,” she says. “I wanted to continue playing for her. But in the end, I couldn’t.”

Nina Wilson pays tribute to her late friend Maddy Cusack (Michael Hulf)

Instead, Wilson has been putting on mental-health workshops with various clubs, as well as coaching younger players. It is not clear when, if ever, she will pull on her gloves again. But she is determined to make good from bad.

“A few people have said, ‘What about your career?’” she says. “I know I’m taking a risk. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do what I thought was right. I can’t play football unless I love it. And my love for football won’t return until something changes and there is justice for Maddy.”

(Top photos: Getty Images, courtesy of Nina Wilson; design: Eamonn Dalton)