The German national team's problems have been a long time coming

Hansi Flick certainly wasn't the answer to Germany's problems, but nor was he the full extent of their issues on and off the pitch. It's time for the German FA to make some serious changes.

The appointment of Rudi Völler as interim Germany head coach on Sunday felt like a somewhat fitting bookend for a notable period in the modern history of the national team. After all, it was following the former forward’s first stint as an unexpected Bundestrainer and his resignation from the post in 2004 that the German FA turned to Jürgen Klinsmann to take a troubled national team in a new direction with fresh ideas and the hope of success.

Hansi Flick may not have been in the room when Klinsmann signed on the dotted line, but he did join the coaching staff two years later and through Joachim Löw and Oliver Bierhoff there’s a clear line to be drawn from that appointment 19 years ago and the mess Germany now finds itself in today. All empires rise and fall and this iteration of Die Mannschaft is no different. The only question left unanswered is how far we still have to go before we hit the bottom.

That, worryingly, is almost certainly because firing Flick is unlikely to fix most of the problems plaguing the German national team at this moment in time. While the appointment of the former Bayern Munich head coach, following an impressive spell in Bavaria, seemed like a logical decision, it now seems clear that Flick offered little more than a bridge to the past, where the national team could cling on to the diminishing memory of Löw’s success while appearing to be pragmatic.