Emmanuel Latte Lath: From Ivory Coast to Union Berlin

Emmanuel Latte Lath still remembers the plane.

Eight years old, leaving Ivory Coast, looking around the cabin and realising, for the first time, that almost nobody looked like him. Excitement mixed with fear. A journey that felt less like a trip and more like stepping into a second life.

“I started to realise when I was on the plane and I saw people different than me, I was a bit scared,” he recalls.

He had known for two years that he would be moving to Europe. The idea arrived when he was six. The reality hit somewhere above the Mediterranean.

Italy meant family, but also distance. His father had left for Europe when he was young, chasing work and a better life. Phone calls were rare, connection even rarer. For a long time, the figure of “Dad” was more idea than presence.

“It was important because when I was born, it wasn't that close,” Latte Lath says. “He went to Italy to find a better life, so it wasn't that easy talking with him every time by phone. I was missing this part from my father.

“When I saw him, it was kind of a new life, new motivation to stay close to my father, and then everything started again. It looks like I had two lives.”

From street rules to structure

Those two lives could not have been more different.

In Ivory Coast, football meant freedom. No boots. No tactics boards. Just him and five friends, a self-made team roaming from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, taking on whoever was waiting at the other end of the dusty pitch.

“Me and my five friends, we just built our team and we would go to play against another city, there was like no pressure, nothing,” he says.

“It was just funny moments, enjoying football there, and it was quite competitive because it was almost every time finishing in some fights, so it was street rules. I was one of the most competitive.

“I missed it. Always together, being with my friends. It was really, really fun.”

That raw, chaotic education turned out to be vital. When he finally landed in Italy, he arrived with no experience of organised football. No club background, no formal coaching, no boots. Just a competitive edge sharpened on concrete and dirt.

Suddenly, everything changed. New country. New language. New expectations.

“It was exciting to learn and to show my potential,” the Union Berlin forward says. “It was difficult in the beginning because I didn't know the language, but I had a really good person who helped me.

“It was important for me because I didn't have too many friends there. But I was just there to play football and after go home, I know timing will come.”

The timing did come. Slowly at first, then all at once.

A flash of light in Bergamo

By 2015, Latte Lath had fought his way into Atalanta’s academy, one of the most respected talent factories in Europe. Two years later, he was standing on a pitch against Juventus in the Coppa Italia, wearing the shirt of La Dea and waiting for his moment.

He didn’t have to wait long.

He scored in just his third appearance for the club, a goal that still lives vividly in his mind.

“It's unbelievable, it's unforgettable. The emotion I had there, it's still the same when I'm thinking about it now,” he says.

“The week before I was home with my family, we were just laughing and they were saying, 'imagine if I go, imagine,' and one week after that it happened.”

The dream, though, flickered rather than burned. That goal would be his only one for Atalanta and his last competitive appearance for the club.

What followed is a familiar story in Italian football. A young forward, talented but not yet trusted, sent out on loan after loan in search of minutes and maturity. Eight different clubs in five years. A career lived out of suitcases and temporary dressing rooms.

“I think Italian football has always been one of the difficult football environments because it's a lot of tactics, a lot of rules also,” he says.

“So it doesn't let you express yourself because you have to play with too many or a lot of rules.

“So it was difficult also to make a step, but it was also difficult to maybe keep going with the steps I made, but this gave me power to make a different choice.”

That choice would eventually take him out of Italy and onto a very different path.

Finding a home in the North East

A prolific loan spell with Swiss side St. Gallen changed the conversation around him. Goals travel well, and they carried his name to England.

In 2023, he arrived in the north east, signing for Middlesbrough in the Championship. New league, new language environment, new style of football. But this time, he found something he had been missing for years: stability and trust.

At the heart of it was Michael Carrick.

“I found a good coach and a good person. It gave me straight away confidence,” Latte Lath says.

“He was a calm person, a calm coach, maybe sometimes too much, but it was needed for us. He knew always when and what he should say to you in the difficult moment or in the good moment.

“So for me, I think in that point of my life, it was really important.”

That calmness unlocked the forward that had been fighting to get out since those street battles back in Ivory Coast. With Carrick behind him, Latte Lath became one of the most dangerous strikers in England’s second tier, scoring 29 goals in 67 games for Boro.

The numbers earned him a move that underlined his rising profile: a transfer to Atlanta United, where he became the most expensive signing in Major League Soccer history at the time.

The story, though, did not unfold as scripted.

A reset in Berlin

America promised a new stage, a league eager for marquee attacking talent and a city known for its energy. But his time with Atlanta United “did not live up to the expectations”, as he puts it, and the momentum he had built in England stalled.

So he came back.

This summer, Latte Lath returned to Europe on loan with Union Berlin, a club whose identity is built on defiance, graft and a fanbase that treats every match like a cause.

“I arrived here and I am surprised because the fans' passion is crazy. This is something new for me. It gives me an extra muscle, another power to do well,” he says.

Berlin suits him. A city of layers and contradictions, of histories and reinventions. A place where nobody blinks at someone who has lived, in his words, “two lives”.

“Berlin is huge, I love different cultures, and you can find different cultures and people,” he says. “I think I can fit in because I grew up with different friends and cultures.”

From the streets of Ivory Coast to the tactical grind of Italy, from the roar of the Riverside to the noise of Köpenick, Emmanuel Latte Lath has carried his story with him.

Now, in a city that thrives on second chances and new beginnings, he has the platform to decide what the next chapter of that story looks like.