Following in the footsteps of an older brother has its benefits. Just ask Benoit Badiashile.

Our defender was born in 2001, three years after his only sibling Loic. Football mad, and possessing plenty of natural talent, Loic would pass on his love of the game to his little brother. Benoit had no choice but to immerse himself in the sport. It was in the streets of Limoges, in the south-west of France, that he began his footballing journey.

‘I played in the centre of the city with my brother,’ Benoit tells us.

‘We played all the time. He is older than me, and that helped. It gave me strength and competitive spirit. I had to learn to fight! It was good.

‘I didn’t play football at school, but one day I went to watch my brother training at Limoges, our local club. I was doing keepy-uppies with the ball. The gaffer of my brother’s team saw me and asked me to come and train with us. That’s how I started playing football properly.’

Fast-forward a few years, and Benoit was following goalkeeper Loic once more, this time by signing for AS Monaco. They even lived together once Benoit had turned professional.

‘He gave me a lot of advice,’ smiles Benoit. ‘He made a few mistakes and he talked to me and said, ‘don’t do this, or do this’. It was easy for me. It was a big help.

‘We are still so close, like this.’ Benoit wraps his index fingers around each other. ‘I speak to him every day.’

It is not just to his brother that Benoit owes a great deal of gratitude. His parents made him the man he is today: kind, calm, and funny. They were born in the Republic of Congo and met there before moving to France. They ingrained Congolese values in their sons: ‘to share, and to love each other,’ says Benoit. He laughs. ‘And the food as well!’

Benoit started playing for Limoges’ youth teams at the age of seven, but before long his family were on the move to Malesherbes, a smaller town about 40 miles south of Paris. His mother got a job in a factory there, and also looked after his father, who was not well enough to work.

Between the ages of eight and 12, Benoit played for Sporting Club Malesherbois: ‘The freedom they gave me was the most important thing I learned,’ he says.

By way of thanking the club for their role in his development, Benoit and his brother founded a high-profile youth tournament last year. It is called the BLB Cup, named after the siblings, and the inaugural edition was won by Monaco Under-13s and Chelsea Under-11s.

It was while playing for Malesherbes that Loic was spotted by Monaco. He signed on. Not for the first time, Benoit followed suit.

‘The same scout who scouted him went to one of my games, and said he wanted me to sign as well for Monaco. The choice was easy to say yes. It was a great feeling.’

Benoit initially moved to an academy in Chateauroux. Like the prestigious Clairefontaine, it is operated by the French Football Federation [FFF].

‘I was 12 years old when I went to Chateauroux, and at the start I was crying every day,’ he admits.

‘Leaving my family was the most difficult thing. I wanted to stop, to come back to Malesherbes. My mother, and my dad as well, said I had to be strong, and to keep working.

‘Things got better. The football became a bit more serious. You start to understand the game more. I trained every day at Chateauroux, and I did school there too.

‘When you spend every hour of every day with the same people, you start to create some friendships. It was good.’

Having accelerated his development under the watchful eye of the FFF, Benoit moved south to Monaco in 2016. ‘They were the best years of my life when I was living in the academy there, with all my friends, starting to see a lot of new things,’ he smiles. ‘They were really good times.’

Benoit signed his first professional contract aged 16.

‘I was a bit surprised. Wow. It was something big for me. I was really young and I had trained once with the professional team. It was a great feeling. A really great feeling.’

The following year, in late 2018, Benoit established himself in Monaco’s senior team. He quickly made his Champions League debut, playing the full 90 minutes at centre-back away to Atletico Madrid. He was still only 17.

Benoit hasn’t looked back, accruing almost 200 career appearances to date, including two for the French national team. There is a clarity of thought in Benoit’s explanation why he thinks he was able to make it in the professional game, when many of his team-mates at Chateauroux and in the Monaco academy were not.

‘I knew what I wanted,’ he states.

‘I wanted to become a professional footballer. I knew what I had to do to become a professional footballer. I had to work. Keep working. Even when it was tough when I was younger. You just have to clean your mind and be the best you can.’

And, of course, he had his big brother Loic by his side all along.

‘He is the person who has influenced my life and my career the most. He has helped me a lot, and he continues to do so.

‘Considering all the challenges I had to face throughout my career, both positive and negative, he has always been there. Without him, I don’t think I would have come this far.’

The Badiashile brothers: united in life, and in football.