With the greatest respect to Jose Mourinho, if you're finding yourself compared to his final weeks in charge of Manchester United, you're not in a good place.
On Sunday, December 17, 2023, Erik ten Hag takes his embattled and bruised Red Devils to Anfield to face Liverpool, who start the weekend as the Premier League leaders. United, sixth in the league, are on a run of two wins in six games in all competitions, one of which was a one-goal loss in their final Champions League group game. Lose to Liverpool, and they will be 13 points behind their great rivals in the table.
On Sunday, December 16, 2018, Jose Mourinho took United to Anfield to face Liverpool, who started the weekend as the Premier League leaders. United, sixth in the table, were on a run of one win in six games in all competitions, one of which was a one-goal loss in their final Champions League group game. They lost 3-1 to Liverpool, falling 19 points behind their great rivals in the table.
Two days later, Mourinho became the third permanent United manager since Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement to be fired from the job. Five years on, Ten Hag is at risk of becoming the fifth. If United lose, they will only be one point better off after the same number of games than they were under Mourinho.
This particular fixture has been a rivalry in name only over recent seasons. United haven't won at the home of their fierce adversaries in their past eight visits. The only goal they've scored in that run came from Jesse Lingard in that 3-1 loss that brought an end to Mourinho's toxic final few weeks in charge.
And, of course, the shadow of their most recent visit to the red side of Stanley Park looms large over Ten Hag and his players: a 7-0 loss, their heaviest defeat since 1931 and Liverpool's biggest in history in this fixture.
Liverpool 7 (SEVEN)-0 Manchester United: The Red Wedding.#LIVMUN pic.twitter.com/QG7XFIy3mS
— Opta Analyst (@OptaAnalyst) March 5, 2023
In many ways, they haven't been right ever since that humiliating visit in March. It can be argued that Liverpool dealt Ten Hag a mortal wound that day. Now, they can finish the job.
They've done the same thing to every permanent United manager since the great Ferguson retired.
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There were plenty of reasons to be optimistic when United last played Liverpool at Anfield. Ten Hag had just ended a six-year trophy drought by winning the Carabao Cup final against Newcastle United as part of a run of one defeat in 22 games in all competitions. They had beaten Liverpool at home in the reverse fixture, seen off soon-to-be La Liga champions Barcelona over two legs of a Europa League knockout playoff, and edged out Manchester City at Old Trafford.
By contrast, Liverpool had won six of 13 matches and had just been beaten 5-2 at home by Real Madrid in the Champions League. Jurgen Klopp was struggling to get a consistent tune out of his players, and they would fail to finish in the top four come the end of the season. A week after playing United, they lost 1-0 at struggling Bournemouth.
What followed was described by Klopp as "a freak result that happens once in a lifetime". Statistically, he has a point: Liverpool scored seven goals from eight shots on target worth 2.78 expected goals, meaning such a scoreline would be highly unlikely if the match were to be more or less repeated. The scores were level until the 43rd minute; seven minutes later, Liverpool led 3-0. They scored a further four in the final quarter of an hour as United utterly capitulated.
But, freak result or not, it proved a turning point under Ten Hag. In 2023, United have lost 19 games in all competitions, their worst such return since 1989. Seventeen of those defeats have come since the Anfield debacle; before then, they were enjoying a run of two losses in 32 matches. They have lost half of their 24 games this season. A 13th this weekend could prove unlucky indeed for their manager, even as the confusion persists over when Sir Jim Ratcliffe will take sporting control of the club.
Ten Hag would not be alone in seeing his future determined by a loss to Liverpool. It's arguably happened to every United manager since 2013.
For Mourinho, it was the decisive blow. The one-sided nature of that 3-1 loss was the final straw after a run of poor results, worse performances and a poisonous atmosphere at the club fostered by the combative coach. Two days later, he was gone.
His successor, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was sacked only four games after Liverpool turned United over 5-0 at Old Trafford in October 2021 — a match that could quite easily have ended in more than a 7-0 win had the visitors not decided to conserve energy against their 10-man hosts for the majority of the second half.
Mourinho's predecessor, Louis van Gaal, was removed from his role shortly after winning the 2016 FA Cup final. United's decision-makers worried the team had regressed under his leadership and could be left behind by Manchester City, who had just named Pep Guardiola their next boss. Van Gaal oversaw a famous 2-1 win at Anfield in which Steven Gerrard earned a red card moments after coming on as a halftime substitute, yet a 3-1 aggregate Europa League loss to the Reds in early 2016 underlined the fact that Van Gaal's methods were not likely to keep up with the promise Liverpool were showing under Klopp.
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David Moyes, the hand-picked successor to Ferguson who didn't even last a full season, oversaw a 3-0 home loss to Liverpool in March 2014 in which Gerrard scored two penalties and missed another. It was another one of those matches where Liverpool eased off the gas, otherwise it could have been even more one-sided. It prompted the heaviest criticism of any of their performances under Moyes and, less than two months later, he was sacked after a loss on Merseyside to Everton.
As with all of these managers, losing to Liverpool was not the sole reason for their dismissal; rather, United chose to take drastic measures due to longer-held doubts around the plans of the man in charge and a fear of falling further adrift of their Premier League and European rivals. Liverpool simply underlined those concerns, often in painfully stark fashion.
It's also worth noting that Ten Hag has things in his favour, even now: the best win rate (61.2%) of any post-Ferguson manager, a positive first season in charge, an acceptance he has been hamstrung by absurd injury problems this season (they could be missing 13 senior players this weekend), and the fact there is a power vacuum at the top of the club that will not be filled until Ratcliffe's investment is ratified, meaning who exactly calls the shots right now is hard to fathom.
But United didn't want to sack any of their managers; in the end, they were simply left with little choice. Another humiliation on Sunday could see the Dutchman learn the same cold truth as Moyes, Van Gaal, Mourinho and Solskjaer: get turned over by Liverpool, and a bad run of results becomes a fatal one.
That, to turn a Mourinho phrase, is "football heritage".
