Emmanuel Latte Lath: From Ivory Coast to European Football Success
Emmanuel Latte Lath can still see the cabin lights and the unfamiliar faces.
He was eight, leaving Ivory Coast for Italy, staring down an aisle full of people who did not look like him. The excitement of Europe collided with something else on that plane.
“I started to realise when I was on the plane and I saw people different than me, I was a bit scared,” he recalls.
That journey did not just move him from Abidjan to Italy. It split his life in two.
Two lives, one reunion
Latte Lath had known since the age of six that he would one day leave for Europe. The reality only landed when the wheels left the tarmac. Friends, family, the chaos of street football in West Africa – all of it stayed behind.
Waiting at the other end was his father.
“It was important because when I was born, it wasn't that close,” he 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.”
The second life began in a country whose language he did not speak, in a culture he barely knew. The bond with his father became an anchor. It helped him navigate classrooms, new streets, new rules.
What he could not easily replace was the freedom of those early days in Ivory Coast.
Street rules and scars
Before Italy, football meant bare feet and dust. No boots, no bibs, no coaches. Just a ball, a patch of ground and six boys who treated every game like a final.
“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.”
Those chaotic afternoons would prove crucial. They gave him toughness, instinct, a taste for duels. When he eventually stepped into organised football in Italy – boots on, pitches lined, tactics explained – that street edge travelled with him.
“It was exciting to learn and to show my potential,” he says. The language, though, was a wall at first.
“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.”
Timing did come.
Atalanta and a night against Juventus
By 2015, the raw kid from the streets of Ivory Coast had reached one of Italy’s sharpest talent factories. Atalanta took him into their academy, a place that had already started to reshape the country’s football landscape.
Two years later, he found himself on a stage he had only imagined: the Coppa Italia, in an Atalanta shirt, against Juventus.
He scored in just his third appearance for La Dea.
“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.”
That goal should have been a beginning. Instead, it became a full stop. It was the only goal he ever scored for Atalanta and the last time he played competitively for the club.
What followed is a familiar story in Italian football: the loan carousel.
Lost in the system
Over the next five years, Latte Lath was sent out on loan to eight different clubs. Different shirts, different managers, different systems. The promise that flashed against Juventus had to fight for air in a landscape that can be unforgiving to young forwards.
“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 came after a prolific spell at St. Gallen in Switzerland. Away from the rigid frameworks of Serie A and Serie B, he found rhythm, goals, confidence. His performances there opened a door he had not walked through before: English football.
Carrick, confidence and a scoring streak
When Middlesbrough brought him to the Championship in 2023, the move did not make major headlines. Inside the club, though, Michael Carrick saw something he liked – and crucially, he knew how to bring it out.
“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.”
With Carrick’s quiet authority behind him, the Ivorian turned into one of the most dangerous strikers in England’s second tier. Direct, aggressive, relentless in the box, he scored 29 goals in 67 games for Boro.
The numbers attracted attention. Big attention.
A record move, then a reset
Atlanta United came calling, and with them, Major League Soccer history. Latte Lath moved to the United States as the most expensive signing in MLS at the time.
It sounded like the perfect reward for the years of graft and uncertainty. The reality was more complicated. The American chapter did not live up to expectations, on or off the pitch. The fit was not right.
By the summer, he was on the move again, this time back to Europe and into a very different football world: Union Berlin.
The club that had risen from the fringes of German football to the Champions League on a wave of defiance and unity now had a new forward with his own story of resilience.
Extra muscle in Berlin
Latte Lath arrived in the German capital and felt something unusual straight away.
“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.
Union’s supporters, packed into the compact Stadion An der Alten Försterei, are famous for their noise, their loyalty, their refusal to let the club forget its roots. For a player who grew up in the intensity of street football and the emotion of two continents, the connection feels natural.
“Berlin is huge, I love different cultures, and you can find different cultures and people. I think I can fit in because I grew up with different friends and cultures.”
From Abidjan’s street rules to Atalanta’s academy, from the tactical labyrinth of Italian football to the roar of the Championship and the glare of MLS money, Emmanuel Latte Lath has lived those “two lives” he talks about.
Union Berlin, with its raw edges and restless energy, might just be the place where they finally come together.
