Children who interact with football's recruitment and transfer processes encounter a complex web of regulations and practices. Debates over how to ensure that the interests and well-being of young football players are adequately protected, and that risks to their rights and welfare are identified and addressed, have become a topic of academic, political, and media concern. This commentary article provides an overview of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) regulations concerning the mobility and representation of minors in player recruitment processes, in particular the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP) and the Regulations on Working with Intermediaries (RWI). We examine these regulations through the lens of the United Nations Children's Rights Conventions (UNCRC). In so doing, the article demonstrates how football's regulatory frameworks and commercial practices inadvertently yield consequences that operate against the best interests of children involved in the sport. To counteract this, it is proposed that all planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of regulations involving the recruitment and transfer of young people should be explicitly informed by globally accepted standards of children's rights, such as the UNCRC. More specifically, it is argued that FIFA should adopt an approach that places the child at the centre of regulatory frameworks and characterises the child as a 'rights holder'.

The EU is pursuing an increasingly explicit agenda in relation to young immigrants and asylum-seekers, leading the supra-national legislature to grapple with the question of how to ensure that children's rights are upheld through this body of law. The tool of mainstreaming, which ensures that a particular concern is promoted through its incorporation into the entire law-making process, has emerged as a key strategy in this regard. This article explores the use of mainstreaming within the specific context of children's rights and uses its implementation in the specific context of the European Union's (EU's) asylum and immigration laws as a case-study to assess both its successes and its shortcomings. Using similar mainstreaming activities in the gender equality arena by way of illustration, the analysis questions, in particular, the capacity of mainstreaming: to accommodate the heterogeneity of child migrants as a group; to ensure appropriate representation and coordination in relation to children's rights at institutional level; and to deliver an adequate knowledge base to underpin decision making in the legislative process in relation to young immigrants and asylumseekers. The discussion concludes by pointing to some of the current deficiencies of children's rights mainstreaming, and speculating on its capacity to successfully promote the needs of young people in EU laws and policies in the future.

This paper challenges dominant concepts of the child in migration law, using recent legislative activity at European Union (EU) level as a case study. The Treaty of Amsterdam 1997 (which entered into force 1999) gave the EU competence to pass binding legislation on asylum and immigration. What has followed is a body of law that governs a number of types of migration and stages of the migration process, the overwhelming majority of which makes specific provision for children. This paper demonstrates that the EU's legislative activity in this area has had, and will continue to have, an appreciable impact on the legal regime governing child migrants. Furthermore, it questions the characterization of the child migrant found in this legislation, and its subsequent interpretation by the European Court of Justice. The validity of an emerging categorization of children according to age thresholds, their reasons for leaving their country of origin, their stage in the migration process and their nationality is examined. In particular, it is argued that the EU risks undermining its own commitment to children's rights by basing its laws on assumptions about childhood and the migration process that lack empirical grounding. As the EU looks towards an increasingly explicit and extensive agenda in relation to young immigrants and asylumseekers, it is argued that more robust methods of incorporating children's rights into laws and policies must be sought.

Reports of human trafficking within the football industry have become a topic of academic, political, and media concern. The movement of and trade in aspirant young (male) footballers from West Africa to Europe, and more recently to Asia, dominates these accounts. This article provides an overview of scholarship on this topic, with a specific focus on exploring how this form of human trafficking intersects with broader debates over children's rights in the context of exploitation tied to irregular forms of migration. The article illustrates how popular narratives associated with the trafficking of young West African footballers mimic stereotypical portrayals of child trafficking, which have implications for the solutions put forward. It is argued that popular representations of football related child trafficking are problematic for several reasons, but two are emphasized here. First, they perpetuate a perception that the mobility of young African footballers entails a deviant form of agency in need of fixing, while simultaneously disassociating the desire to migrate from the broader social structures that need to be addressed. Second, and relatedly, they result in regulations and policy solutions that are inadvertently reductive and often at odds with the best interests of the children they seek to protect.

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