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 eventually sold to Saint-Etienne in the summer of 2011. Milan have been regretting letting him go for more than a decade as he advanced his career at Borussia Dortmund, Arsenal and then Barcelona.
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On Wednesday evening at Stamford Bridge, the superstar of the Aubameyang clan will confront the club where he learnt from greats – he used to study Ronaldo’s finishing closely, even if, as Pierre-Emerick reflected at the weekend, that late-career version of the iconic Brazilian “was a bit fat” – aiming to remind them they were mistaken in allowing him to leave.
The Gabonese will likely lead Chelsea’s forward line in a fixture of high jeopardy for the London club. Chelsea are bottom, with a single point, of a Champions League Group E led by the Italian champions, who have four points.
Safe to say, this was probably not the scenario the much-travelled Aubameyang, who scored his first Chelsea goal at the weekend, envisaged when, at the tail end of the summer, he made Chelsea the ninth club of his senior career.
Nor the situation Thiago Silva would have anticipated as he approached his 38th birthday last month. The Brazil defender won the Champions League at the end of his first season at Stamford Bridge, a trophy he chased in vain while at Paris Saint-Germain and, before that, during three seasons at Milan, where, up until 2012, he persuaded milanisti he was a worthy successor to the likes of Maldini and Nesta.
Thiago Silva’s arrival in London in the summer of 2020 was Chelsea’s vote for experience, a wise one as it turned out, but there were consequences for the club’s then up-and-coming defenders, jostling in the queue for regular spots in the starting XI. Kurt Zouma and Andreas Christensen left in successive summers. Marc Guehi, now an England international, moved on.
So did Fikayo Tomori, who had already won the first of his three England caps while at the Bridge. Twenty months after an initial loan to Milan, Tomori is a rossonero mainstay, and will probably be charged with marshalling Aubameyang.
Maldini, now technical director at Milan, was among those who enthusiastically endorsed the club’s initial €20 million payment to Chelsea to make Tomori’s transfer permanent. The fee seems more and more modest as the 24-year-old matures, especially when it is framed by the amount Chelsea invested in the young centre-back Wesley Fofana in the last transfer window. Fofana cost more than €80m when he moved from Leicester City.
To Thiago and Fofana falls the task of containing another ex-Chelsea man. The last act of Olivier Giroud, three seasons a Blue, was watching the 2021 Champions League triumph from the bench, having contributed six goals to the club’s journey to the final. He joined Milan that summer.
The 36-year-old would spearhead the club’s first Serie A triumph for 11 years. He’s been among the goals this term, too, with six from eight starts. Like Aubameyang, Giroud has a point to make to his former employers about being too hasty to discard an enduring talent.
