How long to keep a club's videos

Nobody asks how long to keep videos in the first season. The question arrives the day the space is full, when a parent asks for a clip to be deleted, or when someone looks for a match from last season that no longer exists. By then, deciding costs more than if the rule had been written at the start.

What the law says, and what it does not say

There is no legal duration for training or match videos. What exists, in Switzerland as in the European Union, is a principle: personal data is kept only as long as needed for the stated purpose. A video in which players can be recognised is personal data, even when it is published nowhere.

In practice, no duration is imposed: the club has to set it, write it down and stick to it. That last point is what matters. A duration announced to parents and then never applied is the only situation that is really at fault, more so than having no duration at all.

What it actually weighs

Orders of magnitude, to decide on figures rather than gut feeling. One hour of 1080p video weighs between four and six gigabytes. A full match, warm-up included, therefore comes to around ten gigabytes, and a season for a single team to between one hundred and two hundred. Three teams over three seasons go past a terabyte without anyone having decided anything.

By comparison, the sequences you keep weigh nothing: three fifteen-second clips per match come to less than a gigabyte for a whole season. The ratio is about one hundred to one, and it is a club's whole retention policy in one sentence: keep the clips, throw away the full matches.

A policy in three lines

It fits on one sheet and is decided once:

1. Full matches: one month. After three weeks, nobody reopens a whole match. A month leaves time to extract what is useful.
2. Kept sequences: one season, or the current season plus the next. That is the duration that matches real use: comparing a player with themselves from one year to the next.
3. Club archives: no limit, but kept separate. A final, a promotion, an anniversary match. A few files per decade, stored apart and outside the teams' workspace.

Sorting happens once a year, at the end of the season, in one hour, by the person who filmed. Spread over the year, it never happens.

Where not to put them

• On a volunteer's phone. A phone only delays the loss. The device changes, the person leaves, and the season disappears without anyone having decided anything.
• In a personal storage account. Same problem, plus a legal impossibility: the club has committed to who can access the footage, and can no longer guarantee it.
• In a group chat. Videos get copied onto every phone in the group. No deletion is possible afterwards, which makes any removal request impossible to honour. See sharing videos without a group chat.

The right place is a space in the club's name, with at least two declared administrators, and whose hosting country you know. That is a mention to include in the consent signed by parents.

Deletion requests

A player, or their parents, can ask for footage to be removed at any time, without giving a reason. Three things to prepare before the first request, because it always arrives at the wrong moment:

• An address where the request arrives, known to families.
• A deadline the club keeps, thirty days for example.
• A written decision for when several players appear in the same sequence: deleting the whole clip is the only simple solution, and it is better to have settled it in advance.

At TactiCam, videos of a team without an active subscription are erased after one year, following two written warnings. Whichever provider you choose, ask them for this rule in writing, because it decides what you can promise families.