Bayern Munich’s Champions League demolition of Chelsea on Tuesday coincided with lunchtime on the west coast of Canada, and in the cafeteria at the Vancouver Whitecaps academy, the players and staff gathered to watch the prodigy who had emerged from their club.

Alphonso Davies, the flying left-back who left Chelsea defenders trailing like leaves in a breeze, has become the club’s most famous alumnus in the past six months and changed the way in which Major League Soccer is viewed. On Tuesday, Davies, 19, announced himself as one of the best full-backs in the Champions League, having made his first start for Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga only on Oct 26, since when he has played every league and European game.

Watching in Vancouver was Craig Dalrymple, the academy’s technical director, born in Leicestershire and a trainee at Ipswich Town in the mid-1990s, when English football had only just stopped referring to teenage players as apprentices. “When he went on that run for the third goal, there was a gasp in the room,” says Dalrymple, 46, on the phone from Canada, where he has been for close to 20 years.

The Davies story is remarkable. He was born in 2000 in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana after his parents, Debeah and Victoria, fled the civil war in their own country, Liberia. While in the camp they were offered settlement by the Canadian government in Windsor, Ontario. “I studied the history but I didn’t know anybody in Canada,” Debeah said in an interview with the Whitecaps website, “but I said OK.” It has become one of the great stories of Canadian sport, and its implications for MLS have been just as significant.