Coaching, mental health and getting help: A conversation with Matt Beard’s brother

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 Burnl...

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