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The following article contains a discussion of suicide.
Each day Mark Beard spends in recovery is a reminder of what could have been. He is living a version of the future that his brother, the late former Liverpool Women manager Matt Beard, could have had.
Mark is a professional development coach at Premier League club Hull City. His brother Matt was a revered women’s football coach synonymous with Liverpool, where he won back-to-back Women’s Super League titles in 2013 and 2014 before returning to guide them back into the top flight in 2022. He also led West Ham Women to an unlikely FA Cup final, was twice voted WSL manager of the season and was posthumously inducted into the league’s Hall of Fame this year.
Matt died at the age of 47 last September. The inquest into his death is not concluded, but a coroner’s court was told that he took his own life.
In the months after Matt’s death, Mark went to Sporting Chance, the residential treatment facility and mental health clinic founded by former Arsenal and England captain Tony Adams to help professional sportspeople. Mark checked himself in to address the drinking that had spiralled out of control as he faced the reality of life without Matt.
“It was emotional all the time in there,” he says. That’s partly because he says it would have helped his brother, who, towards the end of his life, struggled with his own alcohol issues but never reached out to similar organisations for help despite Mark’s insistence. “It would have changed his life,” Mark says now.
A conversation with Mark runs the gamut of emotion over the course of several hours. He paints a searing portrait of grief and what it means to witness a family member in a mental health crisis, because he is determined that no one else should have to feel the way Matt did. He wants those working in football, a notoriously bruising industry, to no longer feel like they or others have to just roll with the punches when life and work become overwhelming. He wants mandatory, thorough mental health support for managers, and a culture shift whereby the sport recognises their humanity and vulnerability.
“It’s not a chore for me to speak about it anymore,” he says, at a cafe attached to the gym in Hull that is crucial to his own mental wellbeing. “I’m happy talking about Matt because I’m proud of what he achieved and I’m proud of the person he was.
“The fact that he couldn’t (ask for) help when he needed it — and I’ll keep saying it — is the saddest thing.”
Before Matt became a manager, he was the larger-than-life family man whose party trick was the Running Man dance. He had a wife, Debbie, and two children, Harry and Ellie.
Football was the only career choice for Matt and Mark, immersed in it from birth. Their father, Mick, worked for the youth teams at Millwall, Charlton Athletic and Newcastle United before becoming an agent. Mark played professionally for Millwall, Sheffield United and Southend United. Matt was a youth team scholar at Brentford, but never recovered from an ankle injury sustained in his first month.
So began his devotion to coaching, first with non-League men’s teams, until an invitation arrived to join the women’s team at Charlton. Then Chelsea offered him a part-time role, with Matt working as an estate agent by day. He took a pay cut to join Liverpool for his first full-time coaching job in 2013.
This coincided with the end of Mark’s playing career (he was four years Matt’s senior) and his own steps into coaching. Matt, he says, would ring each of his players on the way to training, “making sure they’re all right”.
“He did really care about his players, and I think that came across after he died — the outpouring of love from everyone,” Mark says.
However, Matt reserved most of his calls for Mark. They would speak “50 times a day, every day”, Mark says. “He’d ring me singing down the phone in the mornings or he’d be ringing moaning about something. Most of the time, it was me being a sounding board and him telling me 27 different ideas.
“One of my biggest regrets is that we never worked together properly,” he says.
Matt also lived his life in constant contact with their father, Mick, who passed away in 2022. “Dad was his security,” Mark says. “Once his security was gone, I think it opened him up and he was vulnerable.”
Mark could see a change in his brother from the coach who had won the Championship a year earlier. In his more fragile state, Matt felt uncharacteristically upset by criticism on social media from Liverpool fans, Mark says. “It got personal and they were sending him direct messages, calling him fat, things like that,” Mark says. “Sometimes, you use that as an excuse to maybe have a drink. He was drinking a lot.”
Mark believes that Liverpool players and staff noticed his brother was struggling with the comments and sought help for Matt. He recollects that Matt had some meetings with professionals, but an upturn in results masked the underlying issues.
Posthumous recognition for Matt — like the WSL Hall of Fame induction — has brought Mark into contact with coaches eager to share their own mental health struggles.
“It’s just more of a business,” he says of some clubs’ approach to their coaches’ welfare. “Everyone’s replaceable at the drop of a hat.”
After Matt was let go by Liverpool in February 2025, he was out of the game for almost a year. It left him especially exposed. He told the BBC he had “no qualms with the decision” but that opportunities were limited.
“I need a plan A and a plan B,” Matt told the BBC. “I want to stay in football but if I can’t find anything — there are not that many professional teams in England in the women’s game — then I need to look at maybe going back into estate agency work or something like that.”
After Liverpool, jobs were promised but never materialised. Matt took what would be his final job, as head coach of Burnley Women, in June 2025.
Mark had warned his brother that he might find the Burnley role frustrating given the club’s resources compared with Liverpool. Burnley’s women’s team had turned professional for the first time, but Matt would regularly call him with a litany of complaints.
Men’s training would overrun and the female players would have to wait in the car park, Mark recalls Matt telling him. Once, Matt couldn’t hold a pre-game analysis meeting before a match because his meeting room had been taken by the men’s team staff. A coach didn’t turn up before one match and players had to drive themselves to the game. Some staff would “blank and embarrass” Matt, Mark alleges.
Mark’s account, and Matt’s wife Debbie’s to the BBC, is that Leicester City was interested in hiring Matt, but Burnley rejected Leicester’s offer to buy out Matt’s contract. Matt then resigned but the move to Leicester never came off. “Once he resigned, he wasn’t even allowed to go in to say goodbye to the players,” Mark says. “He pulled up into the car park and there was someone waiting for him with a box of all his stuff.”
Matt was on gardening leave after he left Burnley, which meant he could not work or talk to other clubs for three months.
When approached for comment, a Burnley spokesperson said: “We extend our deepest sympathies to Matt Beard’s family. Burnley FC is fully cooperating with the legal process, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while those proceedings are ongoing.”
While Matt had previously handled professional setbacks, his mental health was suffering by this point and Mark says his “whole manner” had changed. He would ring his brother at noon to find him in the pub. “When you’re in that space of getting up, there’s nothing to do and you’re waiting for calls, it’s quite easy to have a drink and try to forget about your problems,” he says. “That’s what he did.”
Matt was angry. Mark tried to help him break the cycle, suggesting Matt contact Sporting Chance. Matt reassured him that he had; Mark found out after Matt’s death that he never did. “I should have chased it up myself,” he says. “I wish I had.”
Mark knew that Matt had struggled with suicidal thoughts after their father’s passing — “two or three times, he told me he wanted to be with Dad.”
The pair spoke just two hours before Matt’s apparent suicide attempt. Matt was on a dog walk. “I knew he was a little bit tipsy, but would never think he’d do what he’d do that night,” Mark remembers. Regulars at Matt’s favourite pub would later tell Mark that his brother had left and returned several times that day but seemed to be in good spirits.
Mark recounts unflinchingly what would turn out to be Matt’s final days: waking up to missed calls from Debbie and Matt’s son Harry, rushing to the intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital to spend five days by Matt’s side. He remembers breathing tubes, hospital staff telling him that they had placed Matt in an induced coma “to give his brain a chance to recover after the trauma suffered. So I’m thinking, ‘OK, he’s got a chance’,” he says.
“The next morning, it was only me and my mum. The doctor called us and said he’s had such a significant brain injury, the chances of pulling through are very slim. I could just tell by the doctor’s reaction. I prepared myself mentally for four days. I just knew, deep down, that he was beyond help.” On day five, the family made the decision to turn off his life support machine.
Amid the horror came a moment of dark levity when the family discovered that Matt had registered as an organ donor 11 times, mistakenly thinking he had to register for each house move. “Which Matt Beard is it? He’s all of them,” Mark recalls, chuckling. Eleven parts of his body were taken for donation. “None of us even knew he’d done that,” Mark says. “He was always thinking about other people.”
Mark also found comfort in the words of players and colleagues who had been touched by Beard’s fatherly coaching style.
“Your throat goes, and then it’s pride, and you’re really happy at how well he’s done,” he says. “The scale, from around the world… It just made you realise how loved he was.”
More touching were the condolences from residents in Matt’s village of Hawarden, North Wales, who recognised Matt’s dog Rex when Mark walked him in the days afterwards.
“People were coming out of their houses to pay their respects,” he says. “They’d put a photo of Matty in the pub in his corner where he sits down. It wasn’t the football people that really touched me. It was the everyday people. Matty would speak to anyone and everyone.”
Mark paints a devastating account of what happens when a private grief becomes prematurely public.
In the days before Matt’s death, Mark says, one newspaper repeatedly contacted the hospital for details. Seconds after Matt’s passing, Mark received a message telling him that coaches in the U.S. — where Matt had a spell as head coach of the Boston Breakers before returning to England in 2018 — were already discussing Matt’s death, and that speculation could spread to social media. “Before I had any chance to think about what happened, I had to put a statement out,” he says.
Eight minutes elapsed between Matt’s death and Mark clicking publish on his Facebook post. “By the time we got home,” Mark says, “it was breaking news on Sky Sports.”
In the reality of grief, life shuttled between the public and the personal, the surreal and the hyperreal. Matt often complained about his kitchen sink’s dodgy taps; Mark recalls turning on the tap the night of Matt’s death, being slapped in the face with a jet of water and angrily calling the colleague who had overseen Matt’s house moves in the past. “‘My brother’s just died and he’s been waiting months for someone to sort something out! Get someone around now!’”
Scanning the messages of condolence from across the globe, Mark realised they would need Liverpool Cathedral for his brother’s funeral and the guests wanting to attend. In October last year, his funeral demonstrated the love and gratitude that bound Beard to his adopted city. The brothers’ stepsister Lucy sang You’ll Never Walk Alone.
In the quiet that followed, Mark’s own drinking spiralled out of control. “Everything took its toll,” he says, “because you have time to think about it.” Relationships fractured. He was drinking “just to escape reality”, lying and borrowing money as he considered life without Matt and his father. “I just felt alone, isolated, a mess,” he says.
With the blessing of Hull City, he went to Sporting Chance. He is now a zealous advocate for rehab, using an app to count his days of sobriety and find suggested readings, and still attending twice-weekly video meetings with other Sporting Chance alumni.
“You learn in rehab you’ve got to talk and you’ve got to be uncomfortable,” he says. “I’m Mark, and I’m an alcoholic. It’s one of the worst things you could say because you don’t see yourself as that. Matty didn’t see himself as that. But that’s what you need to do.”
Mark knows the impact his brother made during his coaching career, made clearer after his death. Now, he’s focused on using his legacy to help others.
Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans any time, from any phone, on 116 123 (United Kingdom) or 1-800-273-TALK (United States). Drinkaware provides a confidential service in the UK to anyone wanting information, advice or support about any aspect of drinking problems.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Liverpool FCW, Women's Soccer, Women's Super League
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
Each day Mark Beard spends in recovery is a reminder of what could have been. He is living a version of the future that his brother, the late former Liverpool Women manager Matt Beard, could have had.
Mark is a professional development coach at Premier League club Hull City. His brother Matt was a revered women’s football coach synonymous with Liverpool, where he won back-to-back Women’s Super League titles in 2013 and 2014 before returning to guide them back into the top flight in 2022. He also led West Ham Women to an unlikely FA Cup final, was twice voted WSL manager of the season and was posthumously inducted into the league’s Hall of Fame this year.
Matt died at the age of 47 last September. The inquest into his death is not concluded, but a coroner’s court was told that he took his own life.
In the months after Matt’s death, Mark went to Sporting Chance, the residential treatment facility and mental health clinic founded by former Arsenal and England captain Tony Adams to help professional sportspeople. Mark checked himself in to address the drinking that had spiralled out of control as he faced the reality of life without Matt.
“It was emotional all the time in there,” he says. That’s partly because he says it would have helped his brother, who, towards the end of his life, struggled with his own alcohol issues but never reached out to similar organisations for help despite Mark’s insistence. “It would have changed his life,” Mark says now.
A conversation with Mark runs the gamut of emotion over the course of several hours. He paints a searing portrait of grief and what it means to witness a family member in a mental health crisis, because he is determined that no one else should have to feel the way Matt did. He wants those working in football, a notoriously bruising industry, to no longer feel like they or others have to just roll with the punches when life and work become overwhelming. He wants mandatory, thorough mental health support for managers, and a culture shift whereby the sport recognises their humanity and vulnerability.
“It’s not a chore for me to speak about it anymore,” he says, at a cafe attached to the gym in Hull that is crucial to his own mental wellbeing. “I’m happy talking about Matt because I’m proud of what he achieved and I’m proud of the person he was.
“The fact that he couldn’t (ask for) help when he needed it — and I’ll keep saying it — is the saddest thing.”
Before Matt became a manager, he was the larger-than-life family man whose party trick was the Running Man dance. He had a wife, Debbie, and two children, Harry and Ellie.
Football was the only career choice for Matt and Mark, immersed in it from birth. Their father, Mick, worked for the youth teams at Millwall, Charlton Athletic and Newcastle United before becoming an agent. Mark played professionally for Millwall, Sheffield United and Southend United. Matt was a youth team scholar at Brentford, but never recovered from an ankle injury sustained in his first month.
So began his devotion to coaching, first with non-League men’s teams, until an invitation arrived to join the women’s team at Charlton. Then Chelsea offered him a part-time role, with Matt working as an estate agent by day. He took a pay cut to join Liverpool for his first full-time coaching job in 2013.
This coincided with the end of Mark’s playing career (he was four years Matt’s senior) and his own steps into coaching. Matt, he says, would ring each of his players on the way to training, “making sure they’re all right”.
“He did really care about his players, and I think that came across after he died — the outpouring of love from everyone,” Mark says.
However, Matt reserved most of his calls for Mark. They would speak “50 times a day, every day”, Mark says. “He’d ring me singing down the phone in the mornings or he’d be ringing moaning about something. Most of the time, it was me being a sounding board and him telling me 27 different ideas.
“One of my biggest regrets is that we never worked together properly,” he says.
Matt also lived his life in constant contact with their father, Mick, who passed away in 2022. “Dad was his security,” Mark says. “Once his security was gone, I think it opened him up and he was vulnerable.”
Mark could see a change in his brother from the coach who had won the Championship a year earlier. In his more fragile state, Matt felt uncharacteristically upset by criticism on social media from Liverpool fans, Mark says. “It got personal and they were sending him direct messages, calling him fat, things like that,” Mark says. “Sometimes, you use that as an excuse to maybe have a drink. He was drinking a lot.”
Mark believes that Liverpool players and staff noticed his brother was struggling with the comments and sought help for Matt. He recollects that Matt had some meetings with professionals, but an upturn in results masked the underlying issues.
Posthumous recognition for Matt — like the WSL Hall of Fame induction — has brought Mark into contact with coaches eager to share their own mental health struggles.
“It’s just more of a business,” he says of some clubs’ approach to their coaches’ welfare. “Everyone’s replaceable at the drop of a hat.”
After Matt was let go by Liverpool in February 2025, he was out of the game for almost a year. It left him especially exposed. He told the BBC he had “no qualms with the decision” but that opportunities were limited.
“I need a plan A and a plan B,” Matt told the BBC. “I want to stay in football but if I can’t find anything — there are not that many professional teams in England in the women’s game — then I need to look at maybe going back into estate agency work or something like that.”
After Liverpool, jobs were promised but never materialised. Matt took what would be his final job, as head coach of Burnley Women, in June 2025.
Mark had warned his brother that he might find the Burnley role frustrating given the club’s resources compared with Liverpool. Burnley’s women’s team had turned professional for the first time, but Matt would regularly call him with a litany of complaints.
Men’s training would overrun and the female players would have to wait in the car park, Mark recalls Matt telling him. Once, Matt couldn’t hold a pre-game analysis meeting before a match because his meeting room had been taken by the men’s team staff. A coach didn’t turn up before one match and players had to drive themselves to the game. Some staff would “blank and embarrass” Matt, Mark alleges.
Mark’s account, and Matt’s wife Debbie’s to the BBC, is that Leicester City was interested in hiring Matt, but Burnley rejected Leicester’s offer to buy out Matt’s contract. Matt then resigned but the move to Leicester never came off. “Once he resigned, he wasn’t even allowed to go in to say goodbye to the players,” Mark says. “He pulled up into the car park and there was someone waiting for him with a box of all his stuff.”
Matt was on gardening leave after he left Burnley, which meant he could not work or talk to other clubs for three months.
When approached for comment, a Burnley spokesperson said: “We extend our deepest sympathies to Matt Beard’s family. Burnley FC is fully cooperating with the legal process, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while those proceedings are ongoing.”
While Matt had previously handled professional setbacks, his mental health was suffering by this point and Mark says his “whole manner” had changed. He would ring his brother at noon to find him in the pub. “When you’re in that space of getting up, there’s nothing to do and you’re waiting for calls, it’s quite easy to have a drink and try to forget about your problems,” he says. “That’s what he did.”
Matt was angry. Mark tried to help him break the cycle, suggesting Matt contact Sporting Chance. Matt reassured him that he had; Mark found out after Matt’s death that he never did. “I should have chased it up myself,” he says. “I wish I had.”
Mark knew that Matt had struggled with suicidal thoughts after their father’s passing — “two or three times, he told me he wanted to be with Dad.”
The pair spoke just two hours before Matt’s apparent suicide attempt. Matt was on a dog walk. “I knew he was a little bit tipsy, but would never think he’d do what he’d do that night,” Mark remembers. Regulars at Matt’s favourite pub would later tell Mark that his brother had left and returned several times that day but seemed to be in good spirits.
Mark recounts unflinchingly what would turn out to be Matt’s final days: waking up to missed calls from Debbie and Matt’s son Harry, rushing to the intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital to spend five days by Matt’s side. He remembers breathing tubes, hospital staff telling him that they had placed Matt in an induced coma “to give his brain a chance to recover after the trauma suffered. So I’m thinking, ‘OK, he’s got a chance’,” he says.
“The next morning, it was only me and my mum. The doctor called us and said he’s had such a significant brain injury, the chances of pulling through are very slim. I could just tell by the doctor’s reaction. I prepared myself mentally for four days. I just knew, deep down, that he was beyond help.” On day five, the family made the decision to turn off his life support machine.
Amid the horror came a moment of dark levity when the family discovered that Matt had registered as an organ donor 11 times, mistakenly thinking he had to register for each house move. “Which Matt Beard is it? He’s all of them,” Mark recalls, chuckling. Eleven parts of his body were taken for donation. “None of us even knew he’d done that,” Mark says. “He was always thinking about other people.”
Mark also found comfort in the words of players and colleagues who had been touched by Beard’s fatherly coaching style.
“Your throat goes, and then it’s pride, and you’re really happy at how well he’s done,” he says. “The scale, from around the world… It just made you realise how loved he was.”
More touching were the condolences from residents in Matt’s village of Hawarden, North Wales, who recognised Matt’s dog Rex when Mark walked him in the days afterwards.
“People were coming out of their houses to pay their respects,” he says. “They’d put a photo of Matty in the pub in his corner where he sits down. It wasn’t the football people that really touched me. It was the everyday people. Matty would speak to anyone and everyone.”
Mark paints a devastating account of what happens when a private grief becomes prematurely public.
In the days before Matt’s death, Mark says, one newspaper repeatedly contacted the hospital for details. Seconds after Matt’s passing, Mark received a message telling him that coaches in the U.S. — where Matt had a spell as head coach of the Boston Breakers before returning to England in 2018 — were already discussing Matt’s death, and that speculation could spread to social media. “Before I had any chance to think about what happened, I had to put a statement out,” he says.
Eight minutes elapsed between Matt’s death and Mark clicking publish on his Facebook post. “By the time we got home,” Mark says, “it was breaking news on Sky Sports.”
In the reality of grief, life shuttled between the public and the personal, the surreal and the hyperreal. Matt often complained about his kitchen sink’s dodgy taps; Mark recalls turning on the tap the night of Matt’s death, being slapped in the face with a jet of water and angrily calling the colleague who had overseen Matt’s house moves in the past. “‘My brother’s just died and he’s been waiting months for someone to sort something out! Get someone around now!’”
Scanning the messages of condolence from across the globe, Mark realised they would need Liverpool Cathedral for his brother’s funeral and the guests wanting to attend. In October last year, his funeral demonstrated the love and gratitude that bound Beard to his adopted city. The brothers’ stepsister Lucy sang You’ll Never Walk Alone.
In the quiet that followed, Mark’s own drinking spiralled out of control. “Everything took its toll,” he says, “because you have time to think about it.” Relationships fractured. He was drinking “just to escape reality”, lying and borrowing money as he considered life without Matt and his father. “I just felt alone, isolated, a mess,” he says.
With the blessing of Hull City, he went to Sporting Chance. He is now a zealous advocate for rehab, using an app to count his days of sobriety and find suggested readings, and still attending twice-weekly video meetings with other Sporting Chance alumni.
“You learn in rehab you’ve got to talk and you’ve got to be uncomfortable,” he says. “I’m Mark, and I’m an alcoholic. It’s one of the worst things you could say because you don’t see yourself as that. Matty didn’t see himself as that. But that’s what you need to do.”
Mark knows the impact his brother made during his coaching career, made clearer after his death. Now, he’s focused on using his legacy to help others.
Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans any time, from any phone, on 116 123 (United Kingdom) or 1-800-273-TALK (United States). Drinkaware provides a confidential service in the UK to anyone wanting information, advice or support about any aspect of drinking problems.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Liverpool FCW, Women's Soccer, Women's Super League
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
