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.

So kneel before us Europe. Kneel before our works or Jürgen Klopp will get you. Jürgen Klopp will get you on our behalf, because we’re paying him. Which is more or less the same thing.

How English football rules Europe (with a little help from foreigners) Read more

Failing that England’s Mauricio Pochettino will get you. Or Maurizio Sarri, who will get you even while we tell him he’s a bumbling Clouseau who doesn’t understand proper English substitutions.

At which point it is perhaps time to take a breath, to put the post-imperial crack pipe down, and to consider what all this actually means.

The presence of four Premier League teams in the two European club finals is a remarkable turn by any standard. There is more of this, too. The next month will also bring the Nations League finals, which England have a fair chance of winning, and the start of a World Cup that could see England’s women travel deep into the late stages. Chuck in the ongoing commercial marvel that is the Premier League and from a certain angle this is as good as it gets, a cross-platform high for the mixed and flowing substance that is English football.

It has been thrilling to see our domestic clubs this week, to witness that high-tempo, hard-running, occasionally careless domestic football filtered through to the late stages of sport’s greatest competition. But there are also some obvious issues around calling this a Great English Football Moment, barriers to a wider understanding of how we got here. Let’s break it down word by word. First: greatness. A clean sweep of Euro finalists from the same country has never been done before. This is a first, albeit with some fine margins thrown in. And zooming out, it remains an isolated spike of dominance.

The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.

By any sensible measure we are still living in the age of Spain. Even including this year La Liga has provided seven of the last 12 Champions League finalists and won 10 of the last 14 combined Champions and Europa Leagues.

There have been other eras too. Italian clubs won the Uefa Cup eight times between 1989 and 1999, and provided nine of 22 European Cup finalists at a time when the talent was far more widely spread, the field more open.

Against this Liverpool or Spurs will be only the second English Champions League winners in 11 years. With any kind of long view the Premier League is still an outsider to real European domination, still a shape in the rear view mirror.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A fusion of cultures: Jürgen Klopp and his multicultural squad sing You’ll Never Walk Alone in front of the Kop. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

So much for greatness. How English is it, this great English football moment? On the face of it not very much. Eight of 88 starting players in this week’s four semi-finals were English. Nine were Brazilians. Twelve were Spanish. None of the eight managers were English. No Englishman scored a goal in the Champions League semi-finals.

Ajax play a characteristically Dutch game, Liverpool a modern German game, Spurs a kind of Bielsa style. Barcelona play Catalan Cruyff-ball. Chelsea play whatever kind of Neapolitan thing it is Chelsea play. Even the four English home legs were played in grounds owned by assorted Americans, a Russian and a man who lives in the Cayman Islands.

The only notably domestic aspect to all this is the staging, the geography, and the expertly monetised fan culture. Otherwise the English presence, on the pitch or in the boardroom, is negligible.

Not quite great then. And only slightly English. But how much has the Great English Football Moment got to do with actual football?

There are those who would point us here to the influence of big football finance. Six of the top 10 richest clubs in the world play in England. It is by the by that the top two on that list went out earlier on or that there is isolated extreme wealth in other leagues. A block of powerful, rich clubs constantly dealing and playing with one other should expect to win out in the end.

This is above all a triumph for a business model, the Premier League delivering elite football product drama at an astonishing level, still dividing its wealth evenly among its members, getting greedy but not too greedy, and reaping the global rewards.

Premier League: 10 things to look out for on the final day Read more

From this angle there is no need to feel any kind of England-branded pride about all this. Go, you beautifully efficient corporate behemoths. Make us proud. Then sell it all back to us though our subscription screens and 23,000 square foot club shops.

Not that this is a bad thing, or anything to apologise for. The commercial income is hard-earned. It is the culture, the fine support, the historic achievements (and certain favourable regulations) that make England a magnet for money. The real question is, why has it taken so long to bring in the managerial intelligence to complement this? If anything it has been English people – English managers, English players – getting in the way all along.

For now it is time to bask in the light of this shared body of work. And to enjoy the fact that to call this a Great English Football Moment is in itself an agreeable definition of the word “English”: a paean to shared qualities, cultural crossover and the flushing away not the ramping up of national boundaries.