European finalists deliver a very English great football moment forged overseas | Barney Ronay

They may be foreign-owned corporations featuring few homegrown players but we should celebrate English club successes built on the blurring, not the building, of borders

Nous sommes les meilleurs! Wir sind die Besten! We are the cosmopolitan, financially skewed, managerial-outsourcing champions!

It turns out the English aren’t coming. Look out of the window. We’re already here, in Madrid and Baku, Porto and Amsterdam, complaining about the milk, circling the cafe chairs, standing arms-spread on the hotel bar, simultaneously drunk on English exceptionalism and also deeply mistrustful of the phrase “English exceptionalism” because it contains a lot of syllables.

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