England lost the Brexit derby to Belgium last week. Nigel Farage and Jean-Claude Juncker exchanged barbs, while the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, surprised Theresa May with a Belgium shirt before a summit of EU leaders in Brussels. Meanwhile in Russia, fans were warned that if they sang songs celebrating Brexit the English FA could be fined. The result on the pitch was irrelevant – what mattered was the framing. The England team and Brexit Britain were one and the same: victory for one was success for the other.

But is that true? This is the most multiracial England squad to represent its country at a major tournament, with 11 players of colour. It is also a young squad: the average age is just 26. Every last one of them works with immigrants and appreciates that they have become better at their jobs because of the influx of foreigners into the British game. Most of them live in big cities. If this England team represents anyone, it’s the 48% who voted to remain.

The sense of Europe as a place where England belongs can be seen on the pitch too. England’s head coach, Gareth Southgate, has made no secret of his willingness to learn from other European teams – indeed it was during a weeks-long trip across the continent in the summer that he alighted on the 3-3-2-2 formation that has served the team so well. He has also spoken about the importance of the team’s diversity. How different it would have been under his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, a man who has bemoaned the number of foreign coaches in English football, and has scoffed at young players who seek to play their football elsewhere in Europe.

There’s a hypocrisy to the warm embrace that has been granted to this England team by parts of the media and the population. These are not people they normally like. It is only a month since the government was illegally deporting people who could have been the grandparents of Raheem Sterling or Jesse Lingard. Young men like Dele Alli and Danny Welbeck, with parents from Nigeria and Ghana respectively, are routinely told they should be grateful for the opportunities Britain has given them – a reminder that while they are British, they are not the same class of British as white Brits. And while England players are famous enough not to be stopped and searched, they will have friends for whom that is a depressingly regular occurrence.

England manager Gareth Southgate. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

This team shows us what sort of country Britain could be, if the stories we tell about ourselves were true. Football is a true meritocracy. It doesn’t matter what school you went to, who your parents knew, or how much money you had when you were growing up. Race is also far less of a factor than it is in any other sphere of life (on the pitch, that is – off it, football is still as racist as British society, whether in the stands or the boardroom).

Nor is England the only nation where such a story can be told. National football teams are a far truer reflection of a nation than its government or its elite. There are more black players in the Brazilian team than in the cabinet. A Kosovar immigrant in Switzerland is unlikely to have the opportunity to run a bank, but Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri have made themselves Swiss heroes at this World Cup.

It is football that often allows us to have these debates about who we really are. The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 was heralded as the very best a “Black, Blanc, Beur” nation had to offer. Similarly in 2014, the German team that triumphed in Brazil was a far truer representation of the country as a whole than Angela Merkel’s cabinet. Indeed, in the midst of Germany’s toxic current debate over identity and nationality, it was Germany’s coach, Joachim Low, who found the words to best describe those with dual nationalities, arguing that they have “two hearts beating in their chest”, which wasn’t “always easy to reconcile”.

A multiracial team is, of course, no guarantee of success – both France and Germany crashed out in the first round the tournament after their victories. But a World Cup is a chance for us to argue about a country’s identity. For many of us – and not just those who backed remain – the young, multicultural team on the pitch is a far better reflection of England than the Brexit-supporting politicians cheering from the sidelines.

• Steve Bloomfield is the deputy editor of Prospect and the author of Africa United: How Football Explains Africa