What kit do you need to film your team

What you genuinely need

• A stable tripod, with a head that actually locks. The best value purchase on this list: somewhere between 30 and 80, and it decides half of the final quality.
• A power bank and a cable long enough to charge while recording. Two hours of filming does not fit on a phone battery.
• A solid phone mount for the tripod. Cheap clamps give way in wind, and they always give way with the phone in them.

Total: under 150, using a phone the club already owns.

What helps, depending on your ground

• A second phone, to cover the width of a large pitch in panorama. Usually an old handset in a drawer: it does not need a SIM card.
• A mast or tall tripod (3 to 5 metres), if your ground has no stand at all. It is the one purchase that genuinely improves tactical reading, between 100 and 300.
• A rain cover, in regions where you play in the wet half the season.

What adds nothing for analysis

• 4K. You are looking at positioning fifteen metres away, not at textures. 4K quadruples file sizes, slows every transfer, and improves no tactical reading whatsoever.
• An external microphone. The sound of a match filmed from distance is wind. The useful instructions get written as comments on the clip.
• A motorised gimbal. It exists to film while walking, which you do not do when the camera is on a tripod. On a tripod it adds nothing.
• A wide-angle action camera, except in specific cases: it distorts the edges, which skews how distances read — precisely what you were trying to measure.

Automatic cameras

These are fixed, very wide cameras that crop automatically to follow play. They work well and remove the need for an operator. Two reservations, worth weighing rather than dismissing:

1. The price. Count the unit, the annual subscription, and often the installation. That is a club budget rather than a team one, and it is committed over several seasons.
2. Automatic cropping follows the ball. Handy for rewatching a match, less so for analysis: what matters tactically often happens outside the cropped frame.

If the club has the budget and wants broadcasting as well as analysis, it is a defensible choice. If the need is to review three situations with players on Monday, it is out of all proportion.

The real cost over a season

Equipment is only part of the bill. There is also storage, sharing with players, and above all the time spent sifting. Two hours per match to extract three situations, over a 25-match season, is fifty hours — the most expensive line, and the only one that appears on no quotation.

That is the calculation that actually decides: software that removes the sifting makes the whole exercise sustainable for a volunteer coach, which no amount of hardware does.