There is a sticker on the car outside that offers the first clue this is Maddy Cusack’s old house. ‘MC8’, it says – her initials, the shirt number she wore, and now the name of the charity that has been set up as her legacy.
Inside the front door, her parents, David and Deborah, keep a framed shirt in their hallway from when their daughter played for England’s under-19 team.
Maddy’s room is up two flights of stairs on the top floor. These days, however, the door almost always remains closed. It is too painful, too raw, so the door is usually shut and everything is kept as it was.
And it is heartbreaking. Maddy’s wardrobe is filled with her collection of football shirts. A pile of clothes is stacked neatly on the side, washed and ironed by Deborah on the day before their world was turned upside down.
A pennant from an England game is attached to the bedroom wall and so is the lanyard that gave Maddy access-all-areas at Bramall Lane, Sheffield United’s stadium.
Maddy was proud of that lanyard when she took her job as a commercial executive for the club where she was sometimes called ‘Miss Sheffield United’, as their longest-serving player. Everyone says the same: she had fallen in love with the club and the city. In happier times, her family remember she would walk in from work sometimes and announce her presence with a shout of “Up the Blades”.
Tomorrow, it is exactly one year since Maddy took her own life, aged 27, and if you have followed this story, you will understand why it is a tragedy not just for her family but the sport as a whole, and women’s football in particular.
Maybe you are aware it has led to a Football Association investigation to examine the circumstances surrounding her death.
Maybe you are aware her family lodged a complaint about her manager, Jonathan Morgan, that stated Maddy “would still be with us had he not been appointed”. Or that he subsequently lost his job in “immoral” circumstances — Morgan was exposed as having had a secret three-year relationship with a teenage player at Leicester City, one of his previous clubs, around the same time he was denying the family’s accusation that he had caused Maddy’s emotional anguish.
What you might not know, however, is who Madeleine Stephanie Cusack, born at 8.57pm on October 28, 1995, really was.
Not Maddy, the story – but Maddy, the person. Her life, the memories she created, the people she touched. The real Maddy and what she meant to the people who knew her best. She was, in her mother’s words, her “absolute sunshine”.
The first thing to understand is that it was not just football in which she excelled. The young Maddy was an accomplished horse rider. She played cricket, ran for her local athletics club in Derbyshire and won all sorts of school and district events. Cross-country, 100 metres, long jump — she was an all-rounder. And, in the process, she defied medical opinion.
“When she was eight weeks old, she contracted bronchiolitis and had to spend a week in hospital,” says Deborah. “They said she would never be able to run or do any sport because her lungs had been damaged. She used to cough like mad. Every winter, we had to sleep with all the windows open. But she never let it stop her.”
That sporting talent first became evident to her family on a trip to Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, when the 18-month-old Maddy ran up to a beach ball and kicked it across the sand. “What a left peg,” David, a former amateur footballer, remembers saying.
Therein began a love affair that propelled Maddy — a natural right-footer, incidentally — into the headlines even before the sequence of events that took her, aged 12 onwards, from Chesterfield to Nottingham Forest, Leicester City, Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Leicester again and then Sheffield United.
“For school, we had to buy her a pair of boys’ shoes,” says Deborah. “We got her Clarks ‘Alien’ shoes. I remember what they were called because she played football at every school break and every lunchtime and they were the only ones that could withstand the rough and tumble.”
By the age of six, Maddy was playing for West Hallam Juniors, often running rings around opponents who were a year or two older. Yet the FA’s rules on mixed teams excluded girls after their 11th birthday. So Maddy, from a family of Derby County fans, was blocked from playing and West Hallam lost their star player.
The Derby Evening Telegraph got to hear about it, arranged an interview, and on June 7, 2008, the newspaper carried a photograph of Maddy on its front page.
On page seven, the article was accompanied by a picture of Maddy doing keepie-ups. “Why won’t they let me play with my football team?” the headline asked. But nothing could be done about it, even when a local MP got involved, and the rules meant Maddy had to sit out a cup final for her school team.
“Instead, they asked her to be the manager,” says Deborah. “She was so popular with everyone and they respected her so much, the sports master stepped back and said, ‘OK, you can manage the team’. She was put in charge, telling the boys when to go on and off. And they won.”
A picture is building of a popular, football-mad schoolgirl with a strong family network and the competitive edge that meant in one sports day, she was the only pupil who used starting blocks and running spikes.
Look through the family’s old photographs and you will find lots of Maddy in a Manchester United shirt with David Beckham’s number seven on the back. But there is only one of the young Maddy wearing a dress, from her third birthday party. As for her experiment with ballet, it quickly became clear she was more interested in putting on a pair of shinpads than wearing a tutu. She tried ballet once and that was it.
She and Richard, her older brother, were born 11 months apart. Olivia, now 25, was next to arrive, and then Felicia, 19. You remember that girl at school who always seemed to have a circle around her? “Everyone wanted to be like Maddy,” says Olivia. “Everyone wanted to be friends with Maddy, everyone wanted to know her.”
She was academic as well as sporty. Maddy took her competitive spirit into class, determined to get the top grades. When she did not get the mark she wanted in mathematics, she retook the exam until she came away with an A-star. It led her to Derby University, where she obtained a first-class honours degree in marketing, PR and advertising.
Football ran in the blood of the Cusack family. Nick, Maddy’s uncle, was a player for Fulham, Swansea City and Oxford United among others, before going on to become chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Maddy had her own dreams. Every Christmas, she wanted a new pair of football boots. When she started dating her first long-term boyfriend — the prom king and queen at Kirk Hallam secondary school — he was another keen footballer (one date, Deborah recalls, was spent googling ‘best pair of shinpads to buy’).
It was “a waste of time”, Maddy used to say about going to the cinema and having to sit still for so long. So they went for a run or headed to the local park with a ball. David, a Derby-based solicitor, would join them sometimes and be under pressure to make sure his crosses were pinpointed for Maddy to hit on the volley. Did she ever go in goal? Not a chance.
Her talent had led her to Nottingham Forest’s centre of excellence, then Leicester City’s junior system, before upgrading to Aston Villa at the age of 15, doing her homework in the car while her father drove her to training two or three times a week.
By 17, she was in the first team: a tough-tackling midfielder described by Joe Hunt, then Villa’s head coach, as “off the pitch, quiet, polite and respectful, but on the pitch, aggressive, powerful and commanding… one of the best signings I ever made”.
Maddy helped Villa win the 2013 League Cup and was thrilled to be selected with Jack Grealish, Micah Richards and a few others to launch their new kit. Villa mattered to her. At her family’s house, up the top flight of stairs and past her running machine, her old towel (in Villa’s colours) is still where she last used it — next to the bath beside her bedroom.
It was never a proper wage at Villa, though, and it was still only pocket money when she moved to Birmingham City, in the Women’s Super League, on £30 a week, coming up to her 22nd birthday.
Like many female footballers, Maddy played for the love of the sport. It was never going to make her rich and, aged 18, she took a job at Shipley Park, a garden centre in Heanor, Derbyshire, to get some savings. She was in between her A-levels and university and her dedication to football was about to pay off.
“She used to wash pots or serve food, Monday to Friday,” says Deborah. “She was washing pots when she got her first call-up for England. That, to Maddy, meant everything. It was the pinnacle.”
One of the saddest things is that Sheffield United’s hierarchy appear to have pulled down the shutters when it comes to Maddy’s family and the human touches that you might ordinarily have assumed would be forthcoming.
The family say they have not heard from Stephen Bettis, the chief executive, since he contacted them in December to say Morgan had been cleared by a club-commissioned inquiry — later described by a government minister as a “seemingly quite flawed investigation” — into their seven-page, 3,350-word complaint.
Kevin McCabe, the club’s former owner, has just brought out a book in which he describes Bettis, for unrelated reasons, as “a snake in the grass, a deceitful guy… a turncoat”. Maddy’s family would like to believe that is not the case.
It pains them, though, that the people in charge seem so cold and standoffish, especially as Bettis told them it would be the exact opposite and a club statement claimed they were in “regular communication” with the family, offering them “full support”.
The club do not even follow the MC8 Foundation on X, formerly Twitter. They have not donated a penny to the foundation, which is run by Olivia and raises money for young female footballers to follow their dreams, like Maddy did. Nobody senior from Bramall Lane gets in touch and nothing has come of the 1,200-name petition, delivered last December, from fans requesting her shirt number be ‘retired’ — the kind of tribute that is usually the norm for a tragedy of this nature.
When The Athletic contacted the club this week to raise these matters, they did not respond to any questions.
The club’s attitude has been baffling and, to the family, it seems cruel and uncaring, especially when they have been shown so much love and warmth from supporters.
87′ GOALLLLLLLLLLLLL.
An absolute stunner from @MaddyCusack who hammers one in off the bar from distance. She’s been superb all afternoon.
It’s level again!
🔴 #LFCW 2-2 #SUFCW 🔴 pic.twitter.com/48rJ1MfR5S
— Sheffield United Women (@sufc_women) September 22, 2019
We talk about this while looking through photographs of Maddy and some of the other keepsakes and mementoes her parents have accumulated over the years.
Most of the pictures you will have seen since Maddy’s death show her in the red and white stripes of her football team, but the family’s collection gives a much more complete story of her life. Childhood holidays, birthday parties, school events, team photographs, presentation evenings, nights out. That pretty smile, the shiny hair, the dark brown eyes — as a child, sometimes looking out from behind a pair of spectacles.
One picture is from Maddy’s last Christmas, in 2022, when the family wore festive pyjamas and she came downstairs with a big smile and a Sheffield United-themed Santa hat.
Maddy was the first player to make 100 appearances for the club, but her role at Bramall Lane was more than just being a footballer. She worked for the community foundation, then the club itself. She was the poster girl whose face adorned the side of the stadium. She wrote and designed the programme for women’s matches and, to her family’s amusement, was perfectly happy to include a picture of herself.
She was thrilled in 2022 when she was nominated for the Inspirational Women of Sheffield Awards sports category, named after ex-Olympics gold medallist Jessica Ennis-Hill, one of Maddy’s heroes.
Maddy recruited an old school friend, Luke Ashton, as her strength and conditioning coach. She had her own fridge at home. She filled it with healthy foods and, looking back, her family can laugh about the time Richard’s partner, Emily, invited everyone over for a meal. Emily had spent all day cooking. Then Maddy turned up, in Olivia’s words, “with her own food in a calorie-counted pack-up”.
Nights out could bring their own challenges if Maddy was dragged to a kebab shop and had to find the healthiest option on the menu (“extra salad, please”). And there was no let-up on Christmas Day, either.
“She’d have her Christmas dinner and then announce she was going for a run,” says her father. “I remember saying to her, ‘For goodness sake, why are you running today? It’s Christmas!’ And she said, ‘Exactly – because nobody else will be’.”
It was the competitive streak that enabled Maddy to learn how to ride a bicycle in one session, aged five, because she could not bear to use stabilisers. Maddy liked to play Monopoly (but only when she won). And the competitive fires were burning again, as a 15-year-old, when her combative edge on the football pitch meant Richard, refereeing, had to show his sister a yellow card. Maddy — and everyone says this — always liked to have the last word.
Deborah mentions one sports day at primary school when Richard was winning the egg-and-spoon race until he saw his parents on the sidelines and innocently stopped to wave. “Then it was Maddy’s turn,” says Deborah, and it is lovely to see her laughing about this one. “She knew we were there, too, but did she look at us? Not for a second. She just sprinted past. The only thing on her mind was to get the sticker for winning.”
No date has been provided yet for the FA to announce the outcome of its investigation. More than 40 people have provided statements, including players from Leicester and Burnley (another of Morgan’s previous clubs), and when the findings are published, a date will be set for the coroner’s inquest.
“We know why what happened, happened,” says Maddy’s father. “We know because we were so close to her and she confided in us. We were shocked it happened, but it’s not a mystery.”
Morgan, who was appointed seven months before Maddy’s death, was exonerated by Sheffield United of any bullying or inappropriate behaviour and has always denied any wrongdoing. In a letter to the family, however, Bettis acknowledged that Morgan’s behaviour “divided opinion” among the people interviewed. Some found him supportive and caring. Others described Morgan’s style of management as “isolating some players, quite authoritative and intimidating”.
For the Cusack family, every day is a battle. Next month, it would have been Maddy’s 29th birthday. At Christmas, the angel she made at primary school will go on top of their tree, as always.
Maddy’s personality used to fill the house. Now, the little creaks and thuds — her footsteps in the top bedroom — are no longer audible in her parents’ room directly below. Their grief is unimaginable.
Maddy was a Nicki Minaj fan. She liked Rihanna, Usher, Taylor Swift and many more. Her favourite TV series included Gossip Girl and, growing up, The Hills. In the Covid-19 lockdown, she and her sisters binged on the Hunger Games films. It was a busy house, including three dogs — Heidi, Purdy and Acer — and two cats, Poppy and Elsie.
Friends remember Maddy being devoted to the people she cared about. They talk about the fun she brought into their lives, her ability to make people laugh and the pranks she used to play.
The sleepover, for example, when one of her friends, Emily Cowley, was staying at her house and, before bed, asked Maddy for a make-up wipe. “She gave me a fake-tan one, so when I woke up my face was bright orange,” says Emily, who laughs at the memory. “She just made everything so much fun. I’ve got loads of videos of us being so silly.”
Maddy ended up buying her own place near Chesterfield and leaving the village where she had spent most of her life. It wasn’t far, though, to her family’s house and it was never long before her BMW was back on the drive.
Zoe Stannard, another close friend, lived next door and was two years younger. “I was an only child and Maddy took me under her wing,” she says. “She was the first person who took me clothes shopping and make-up shopping. She was like a big sister, doing my hair, giving me her outfits, helping me revise for school… she really looked after me.”
Maddy, she recalls, was particularly proud of her car. She loved to go for a drive, usually with her music turned up high, especially if it meant finding somewhere for a cappuccino. Or she would walk through the village and talk to the primary school kids. “They all knew who she was,” says Zoe. “She was like a celebrity to them.”
Above all, Maddy was absolutely dedicated to her profession. She took her role as Sheffield United’s vice-captain seriously and welcomed new players so enthusiastically, giving them all her knowledge about life in Sheffield, it could take a while for them to realise she was actually from Derby, 40 miles south.
“She spent ages talking to me in her typically enthusiastic way and taking on the role of tour guide,” says Nina Wilson, the team’s former goalkeeper. “That’s just what she was like, welcoming everyone like they were best friends.”
It was Nina who started calling Maddy ‘Miss Sheffield’, which turned into ‘Miss Sheffield United’ after her picture appeared on the stadium’s walls.
“She would just constantly buzz around everywhere,” she says. “I used to call her my little pest. She was the fiercest winner of all and I’d wind her up for being such a sore loser. But I always respected her honesty.
“One minute, we’d be scrapping about something that needed to be better on the pitch. The next minute, we’d be hugging it out and talking about where to get a coffee. It all always came from her passion for Sheffield and trying to be the best player possible.”
Maddy’s devotion was met, in turn, by her parents’ commitment. They never missed a match, clocking up thousands of miles in the process. “We enjoyed watching her as much as she enjoyed us watching,” says Deborah. “We also supported everything Richard, Olivia and Felicia did, whether it be refereeing, cricket, horse riding or dancing. We were all proud of, and supported, each other.”
And now, approaching the one-year mark, a grief-stricken family is preparing for a vigil outside Bramall Lane in Maddy’s memory.
She was a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a niece, a friend and a heck of a footballer. And she was loved. She was, in Felicia’s words, a “role model… inspiring, I looked up to her”.
Emily had known her since the age of 12. It was a privilege, she says, to call her a friend. “Every single picture I have seen of her (in the media), she has been wearing a football kit,” she says. “But that wasn’t all Maddy was. She was everything else, as well as football, and that’s really important to remember.”
To contact the Samaritans, go to samaritans.org or call 116 123 in the UK, and to reach CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) go to thecalmzone.net or ring 0800 58 58 58
(Top photo: Getty Images/Cusack family; design: Eamon Dalton)
