This week's furor over Manchester United "stealing" Le Havre's Paul Pogba shows, to me, the deeply conflicted ethical issues at play regarding underage players in today's soccer world.

The player here, Paul Pogba, is a very highly rated 16 year old who plays for Le Havre. According to Le Havre, Man U have offered his family money/employment for him to end a contract he has signed with the French club.

Now, we should all agree that the harm here to Le Havre is real. Le Havre has a wonderful academy, and they are seeing a prized investment walk away with minimal compensation.

To my mind, however, we can see from this story that any regulations of this sort of thing are likely to hurt those everybody professes to want to protect: the children. See, for instance, UEFA's Michel Platini: "The question of minors is above all a moral and ethical issue. We have a duty to take concrete steps to protect young players and training clubs."

Platini's heart seems to be in the right place, but you simply can't protect one without endangering the other.

The answer to this sort of scandal, according to many including Juventus' President Claudio Lotito, is to either regulate the signing of underage players, or to allow binding contracts to children as young as 14 or 15.

These moves protect small clubs such as Le Havre, no question: they can effectively 'own' the youngsters. But the underage players will suffer. Taking the Pogba case in point: notwithstanding the shadiness of the deal, the Pogbas will be making a lot of money out of this deal that Le Havre can't match. Having Lotito complain that "the parents sign on behalf of the players" is mind-boggling - these are children! Of course the parents sign and make the ultimate decisions!

You could make an interesting case that perhaps the parents here are sponging off the child-player, and are actually hurting his commercial-sporting opportunities in the process, but who could ever correct for that sort of thing? Even if you make employment offers or payments to parents illegal, this would only hurt the player unless child-player contracts are de facto unlimited in potential outlay. I highly suspect attempts to limit parental gain would act as a de facto ceiling on player compensation, although the devil would be in the details here.

Returning to the Pogba case - he is a child. Do we really think we are helping him, or the thousands of exploited footballing prospects flown in from Africa or South American by shady agents, if we create enforceable contracts for underage players?

Countries around the world recognize that children shouldn't generally be held to enforceable contracts, particularly on things like education, housing, and employment. Given that FIFA, UEFA, and the CAS have created a contractual regime where horrific injustices such as the Mutu fine have been allowed to stand (no national/state court would impose damages such as this for individual breach of contract,) who would we be helping by strangling the options that 15 or 16 year olds have in world soccer? Well, we wouldn't be helping those 15 year olds, that's for sure.

Le Havre has my sympathies, but people like Platini and Totito scare the bejezus out of me.