With all due respect to Jose Mourinho, if you find yourself comparing yourself to his final weeks as manager of Manchester United, you’re not in a good place.

Erik ten Hag sends his battered and broken Red Devils to Anfield on Sunday, December 17, 2023, to face Liverpool, who start the weekend as Premier League leaders. United, who sit sixth in the league, have won two of their last six games in all competitions, including a one-goal loss in their final Champions League group game. If they lose to Liverpool, they will fall 13 points behind their main competitors in the table.

Jose Mourinho led Manchester United to Anfield on Sunday, December 16, 2018, to play Liverpool, who began the weekend as Premier League leaders. United, sixth in the rankings, had one win in six games in all competitions, including a one-goal defeat in their final Champions League group game. They were defeated 3-1 by Liverpool, dropping 19 points behind their main opponents in the league.

Mourinho was fired two days later, making him the third permanent United manager to be fired since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement. After five years, Ten Hag is on the verge of becoming the fifth. If United lose, they will be one point better off after the same amount of games as they were when Mourinho was in charge.

In recent seasons, this game has only been a rivalry in name. United hasn’t won at their hated rivals’ stadium in their last eight visits. Jesse Lingard scored the only goal in that stretch in the 3-1 loss that ended Mourinho’s tumultuous final few weeks in charge.

And, of course, the shadow of their most recent visit to Stanley Park’s red side hovers heavy over Ten Hag and his players: a 7-0 setback, their greatest defeat since 1931 and Liverpool’s largest in this match in history.

They haven’t been right in many respects since that humiliating visit in March. It’s possible that Liverpool delivered Ten Hag a fatal blow that day. They can now complete the task.

They’ve done that to every permanent United manager since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

When Manchester United last played Liverpool at Anfield, there were plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Ten Hag had recently ended a six-year trophy drought by defeating Newcastle United in the Carabao Cup final, as part of a run of one defeat in 22 games in all competitions. They had defeated Liverpool at home in the reverse fixture, defeated Barcelona over two legs of a Europa League elimination playoff, and defeated Manchester City at Old Trafford.

Liverpool, on the other hand, had won six of its previous 13 games and had recently been defeated 5-2 at home by Real Madrid in the Champions League. Jurgen Klopp’s team was struggling to find a regular rhythm, and they would finish outside of the top four at the end of the season. A week after facing United, they were defeated 1-0 by struggling Bournemouth.

Klopp described what happened next as “a freak result that happens once in a lifetime.” Statistically, he has a point: Liverpool scored seven goals from eight shots on goal, worth 2.78 anticipated goals, implying that such a result would be extremely rare if the game were to be played again. The scores were equal until the 43rd minute, when Liverpool took a 3-0 lead. They added four more goals in the closing quarter hour as United crumbled.

But, odd result or not, it was a watershed moment for Ten Hag. United have lost 19 games in all competitions in 2023, their worst record since 1989. Seventeen of those defeats have occurred since the Anfield disaster; before to that, they had a streak of two losses in 32 matches. This season, they have lost half of their 24 games. A 13th this Saturday may be unlucky for their management, especially given the uncertainty surrounding when Sir Jim Ratcliffe will assume sporting control of the club.

Ten Hag would not be the only one whose destiny would be determined by a loss to Liverpool. It appears to have happened to every United manager since 2013.

It was the decisive blow for Mourinho. The one-sided nature of the 3-1 defeat was the final straw in a string of terrible results, poor performances, and a toxic atmosphere at the club fostered by the belligerent coach. He was gone two days later.

His replacement, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was fired only four games after Liverpool defeated United 5-0 at Old Trafford in October 2021 — a game that could have easily ended in a 7-0 victory had the visitors not decided to conserve energy against their 10-man hosts for the majority of the second half.

Louis van Gaal, Mourinho’s predecessor, was fired immediately after winning the 2016 FA Cup final. United’s decision-makers were concerned that the team had regressed under his guidance and would be left behind by Manchester City, who had recently appointed Pep Guardiola as their new manager. Van Gaal oversaw a famous 2-1 win at Anfield in which Steven Gerrard was sent off moments after coming on as a halftime substitute, but a 3-1 aggregate Europa League loss to Liverpool in early 2016 demonstrated that Van Gaal’s methods were not likely to keep up with the promise Liverpool was showing under Klopp.

David Moyes, Ferguson’s hand-picked replacement who didn’t even finish a full season, presided over a 3-0 home loss to Liverpool in March 2014, in which Gerrard scored two penalties and missed another. It was another of those games where Liverpool took their foot off the accelerator, or else it could have been even more one-sided. It provoked the worst criticism of any of their performances under Moyes, and manager was fired less than two months later after a loss to Everton on Merseyside.

Losing to Liverpool, like with all of these managers, was not the main reason for their dismissal; rather, United elected to take dramatic actions due to longer-held misgivings about the man in charge’s ambitions and a fear of sliding farther behind their Premier League and European opponents. Liverpool just emphasized those issues, often in a very direct manner.

It’s also worth noting that Ten Hag has the best win rate (61.2%) of any post-Ferguson manager, a positive first season in charge, an acceptance that he has been hampered by absurd injury problems this season (they could be missing 13 senior players this weekend), and the fact that there is a power vacuum at the top of the club that will not be filled until Ratcliffe’s investment is ratified, which means who exactly calls the shots right now is difficult to determine.

But United didn’t want to fire any of their managers; in the end, they were forced to. Another humiliation on Sunday might teach the Dutchman the same hard lesson that Moyes, Van Gaal, Mourinho, and Solskjaer have learned: be turned over by Liverpool, and a terrible run of results becomes lethal.

To use a word from Mourinho, this is “football heritage.”