Sheffield United’s former manager Jonathan Morgan has defended his relationship with Maddy Cusack despite calling her ‘generally a liar’ in his submission to the FA after her death.
The former Sheffield United midfielder was found at her family home in Horsley, Derbyshire, on September 20, 2023, aged 27.
Shortly after Maddy’s death, her family complained to Sheffield United about Morgan – who had worked with her previously at Leicester City before reuniting with her at the Bramall Lane club in February 2023 – outlining issues allegedly stemming from her relationship with him. The inquest at Chesterfield Coroner’s Court is in its second week.
On Monday, coroner Sophie Cartwright read out a statement that Morgan had submitted to the FA in the wake of Maddy’s death, in which he had said: ‘It’s hard to say something negative about someone who’s just passed away, but what you have to understand was that she was generally a liar.’
Touching on this on Monday, Morgan said: ‘Looking back at that, it’s about the aftermath and where Maddy had omitted a lot of information about the scenario. It wasn’t to do with specifics about Maddy in the environment.’
He later added: ‘She omitted information from her family about things I supported her with.’ Among these, he referenced attempting to help her seek financial support after she admitted feeling weighed down by mortgage payments.
Maddy Cusack was described as ‘generally a liar’ by her ex-Sheffield United manager Jonathan Morgan after her death
Speaking on Monday, Morgan has defended his relationship with Cusack and denied claims against him made at Chesterfield Coroner’s Court
Morgan also went into detail about his relationship with Maddy at former club Leicester, where he released her from her contract in January 2019. The inquest heard last week that she had joined the club in the summer of 2018 after Morgan told her a King Power takeover was imminent and the resulting effect would be a significant upgrade in the club’s facilities. Her mother Deborah Cusack claimed Maddy felt she had gone there ‘on the back of a lot of lies’, with the takeover not materialising until 2020.
Morgan said: ‘We met in a transition period of Maddy’s career where she went down a league (from first-tier side Birmingham) and we went up a league – there was a massive gap in terms of what her expectations were and where we were.’
Morgan had described in his statement that he had found Maddy ‘difficult for me to manage’, and he explained on Monday: ‘It was the pressures and anxieties of her wanting to get back to the WSL as quickly as possible.’
He admitted that there would ‘always be a level of anxiety’ from a player he had previously released but said his first meeting with Maddy – where she has been described as ‘anxious’ – was ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ from his point of view.
‘Maddy came over and greeted me with a hug and we said we’d catch up later on,’ he said.
Morgan said that during his first few months at the club, he saw Maddy ‘joking and laughing’ and ‘having banter’, adding: ‘I wouldn’t say I saw anything different from the day I started, from my point of view.’
Last week, Deborah Cusack said Maddy would have been ‘absolutely humiliated beyond belief’ when Morgan called Maddy’s partner, Grace Riglar, ‘Mrs Cusack’ in front of their team-mates because she wanted to keep her relationship private. Maddy has repeatedly been described by several friends and family members as a generally ‘private’ person who wished to keep her professional and personal lives separate.
On Monday, Morgan denied calling Riglar ‘Mrs Cusack’, saying: ‘The Mrs Cusack thing never happened. It was more banter, a tongue-in-cheek moment, where I said, “Here’s the girlfriends”. They (some of the players) then made jokes in reference to my weight because it had been yo-yoing since I arrived.’ This, he said, justified his belief that he and members of the squad would joke around with each other.
Asked by the coroner whether he had an appreciation of Maddy wanting to keep her relationship private, Morgan replied: ‘All I had from Maddy at the time was that Maddy was open to banter.’
He later said: ‘At the time I did not have an understanding of Maddy’s thought processes. Based on what has been said since, I can see why that may have been significant to Maddy.’
Another topic touched upon was Morgan’s reference to Maddy being ‘bottom heavy’ – a conversation he said felt necessary due to the style of football he wanted to implement, transitioning from a less physical, more defensive-minded set-up under previous boss Neil Redfearn to a side that pressed aggressively high up the pitch. This, he said, was ‘why I was really strict on the physical parameters’ of his squad.
‘In relation to her muscular lower half, I said to her, “Look Maddy, you’re just a bit bottom heavy”,’ he confirmed.
Riglar described last week how this conversation caused Maddy to ‘skip breakfast, go for extra runs after a game’ and that she made ‘slight tweaks in her habits which probably weren’t the healthiest at the time for her’.
He added: ‘Maddy was never doing (extra training sessions) on her own. There would be a list of people doing them after every training session.’ This, he said, was ‘common practice’ in football for players who may not have hit the targets set for them at the beginning of training sessions, with GPS monitoring the distance they covered, the number of sprints, and the number of accelerations and decelerations throughout.
Asked whether he had received any training on how to handle conversations such as these with women, he confirmed he had ‘never had, at any club, any training to discuss physical performance matters with a player’.
The impact, he said, was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘As Grace (Riglar) mentioned, I went up to Maddy and said she looked fitter,’ he said. ‘Maddy took that to mean I’d called her fat, which wasn’t true.’
On Monday, Morgan was asked by Dean Armstrong KC, representing the Cusack family, whether there was a ‘pattern’ to his language towards Maddy, including saying ‘here come the girlfriends’, ‘bottom heavy’ and calling her ‘lovesick’ to colleague Eoin Doyle when the pair were discussing their concerns about her, referencing the fact that Riglar had recently moved from Sheffield United to another club.
Morgan replied: ‘I would argue that’s not a definition of a pattern. They’re just three separate incidents.’
The former head coach, who was dismissed by Sheffield United in February 2024 when details emerged about a past relationship with a player under his charge at a previous club, also vehemently denied calling Maddy a ‘psycho’, citing the fact that the date on which he supposedly said it has been disputed and that the comment was based on hearsay.
He told the inquest: ‘Everyone’s saying they heard it second-hand or from Maddy. No-one’s suggesting they actually heard it.’
Morgan was also asked about a call he had with Maddy when she said she was taking some time away from football and had been prescribed medication.
He said: ‘I told her ‘take all the time you need, there’s always a place for you in my team this season’.’
The inquest continues.
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