Aubameyang and Giroud have points to prove as Chelsea face AC Milan in Champions League

It was a chance meeting, at a provincial airport in Italy. It would change the lives of a football dynasty. The story goes that Pierre-Francois Aubameyang bumped into Ariedo Braida, the then sporting director of AC Milan near the check-in desk at Trieste.

The two retired players got talking, and Braida gathered quickly that Aubameyang had an unusually sharp eye for young potential and some useful connections.

Milan promptly took Aubameyang on as a payrolled talent scout. They were guided by him towards promising footballers, many of them in France, where the ex-Gabon international was based. Best of all, Aubameyang senior had as close ties as possible with a trio of gifted footballers: Three of Pierre-Francois’s sons would join Milan.

The oldest, Catilina, played a handful of games for the senior team in the early 2000s. His brother, Willy, was deemed an exciting prospect in the youth ranks. But the real treasure was the whippet-fast Pierre-Emerick.

At the Milanello training ground, he was timed sprinting 30 metres in under 3.9 seconds. He was reckoned over that distance to be as quick as Usain Bolt. In his practice outings with the first-team he proved a hard-to-tame tearaway for the club’s veteran defenders, Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta.

Unfortunately for Milan – who were reigning European club champions when the 18-year-old Aubameyang joined legends such as Maldini, Nesta, Kaka, Andrea Pirlo and Brazil’s Ronaldo – the closest the precocious striker ever came to a first-team start was an Italian Cup game he spent on the bench.

The Milan of that period, 2007-08, tended to favour the tried-and-tested rather than their tyros. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was loaned out to a series of clubs in his native France and