What kit do you need to film your team

What you genuinely need

• A tall tripod, four metres minimum. This is the purchase that decides what you will be able to analyse: at ground level players overlap, from height the gaps between the lines appear. Lighting and PA stands go far higher than camera tripods for a comparable budget — reckon on 150 to 250. Check the load rating: a phone at the top of a mast is a lever, and the wind joins in.
• A metal phone clamp with a shoe mount. Plastic clamps give way in wind, and they always give way with the phone in them — from four metres, it does not survive.
• A power bank and a cable long enough to charge while recording. Two hours of filming does not fit on a phone battery.

Reckon on 200 to 300 in total, using a phone the club already owns. This is the one place not to economise: a mast that is too short cannot be rescued by any setting, any edit or any software.

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.
• An even taller mast (6 metres), on a full-size pitch with no stand at all. Beyond that, wind load becomes the limiting factor and the base has to be weighted.
• 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.