The United States national team, its players and coaches, will now have two months off to reflect and digest all that has transpired with the team recently.

By “recently,” it doesn’t just mean the inept Nations League performances over the past week, but also everything that has transpired since last summer with the Copa America and its preceding friendlies.

It’s clear now that something is wrong with this group and regardless of any opinions one might have of Mauricio Pochettino or Gregg Berhalter. We are seeing the same problems with two different coaches leading mostly the same group of players.

Yes, some key players were missing. But that is always the case. The reality is that when looking at the teams both coaches have been able to field, the end product is much less than the sum of its parts.

In the loss to Panama, Pochettino was still able to field Christian Pulisic, Tim Weah, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams (who was at 100% with this team for the first time since the 2022 World Cup), Yunus Musah, Chris Richards and Josh Sargent (who also was at his healthiest in years).

But even Pochettino cited the lack of effort in that the U.S. players could not match Panama’s intensity.

The most important takeaway is that the Nations League didn’t merely show us that the U.S. national team is broken but rather it confirmed it.

If the U.S. team had a solid run to the Copa America semifinal or better (which it has done twice, in 1995 and 2016) and the fall friendlies and Nations League quarterfinals went well, then the performances in the final rounds of the Nations League last week could have tossed out as a bad week, which happens in soccer or any sport.

It also could have been dismissed with the fact that under the current landscape, the U.S. team is subjected to annual Nations Leagues, two Gold Cups, and World Cup qualifying (except for this cycle) in every four-year cycle. That is a lot of Concacaf for the U.S. team to get excited about.