During the match, nobody asked where these footballers' grandparents had been born. They were simply willing this English team to win.
Celebrating modern Englishness has remarkably little to do with the entirely separate question of Britain's immigration policy.
Democracies should respond to what their citizens want, and British voters have legitimately made clear that they would like immigration reduced.
Immigration policy can determine who enters Britain.
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But it will not decide how English national identity reflects the millions of people who already live in England.
That question can only be answered by the national story England chooses to tell about itself.
The football team that qualified for the World Cup offered one compelling version of England's contemporary story, drawing on talent from every corner of an England shaped by decades of immigration.
Just months ago, debate raged over whether the English flag was an expression of exclusion when Raise the Colours attached flags to lamp-posts across the country.
Yet this week millions of people wrapped themselves in the same flag without hesitation. The flag itself had not changed – the story attached to it had.
The strongest national identities are those that continually adapt who belongs within a national story.
Canada's former prime minister Pierre Trudeau understood this when he redefined Canadian identity half a century ago.
Rejecting the idea that only Canada's British and French founding peoples embodied the nation, he created identities that allowed Canadians of every background to belong fully while retaining their own cultural traditions.
