The vast majority of our customers in Veo are football clubs. Nothing sensational about this fact. Our product is essentially designed for helping players and trainers by making it easier to record football matches. But during the last months, we’ve seen new types of users who can also see the value of recording football matches.

In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to two organisations who use Veo, but who are not football clubs. We have talked to Jens Biel from Sønderjysk Fodbolddommerklub (Southern Jutland Football Referee Club) and Silas Bang from Jysk Fynske Medier.‍‍

"It is very useful for the referees to observe themselves"

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In the most southern part of Denmark in Southern Jutland, the local football referee club (Sønderjysk Fodbolddommerklub) has started using video technology in the development of the referees. ‍

‘We use our Veo camera to record our pre-talent referees that are members of our union. The purpose of this is to develop our pre-talents and qualify them for even bigger matches,’ says Jens Biel, Materials Manager and member of the talent development committee in the referee club.

For a referee, both positioning and physical appearance on the pitch are important in order to lead a football match successfully. So self observation is valuable.‍

‘We use it for instance for the ref’s running pattern or ref’s location in case of freekick and offsides. It could also be the act in how the referee handles certain situations as giving a reprimand or yellow-red card, and so on. It is very useful for the referees to observe themselves in the way they act and run during these matches,’ Biel continues.

A big part of the teaching philosophy behind the self observation is to make the talented referees choose their own development areas. The process is quite simple, actually:‍

‘When the recorded match is ready on Veo we invite the referee and some talent observers and have them study the match and all situations. The purpose is to make the refs come up with their own awareness and make them tell the observers which situations they could have handled somewhat different and how. But also situations they have handled right. In the end, the referees should come up with some point to maintain and some development points, which they should use for training in the upcoming matches,’ says Biel.

After our conversation with Jens Biel, the Swedish local football union Västergötlands Fotbollförbund has also started recording their matches with Veo in regards to referee development. The combination of video recording, football and refereeing sure seems to have a future (not a word of VAR here!).‍‍

‘… an extra dimension to our coverage’‍

Let’s take a little trip to another area in Danish football. Less than a hundred kilometers to the east, the Danish local media organisation Jysk Fynske Medier records matches from the local Funen Series, the fifth tier in the Danish football league system.

‍‘We record matches from the lower football leagues on the island Funen. We link to the full matches (on the Veo platform, ed.), but we also create highlight videos with just the goals, which we embed in the article on our website Fyens.dk,’ says Silas Bang, Editor for video and digital tools at Jysk Fynske Medier.

Normally, the coverage of lower league football in Denmark is not supported by footage from the matches. Only the three top tier leagues are filmed today. But as video technology has become more affordable and easier to manage, the demand for seeing highlights from local matches can be met by the media organisation.‍

‘Lower league football has thousands of players on Funen and a lot of them and their families like to keep up to date with results and comments from coaches on our site and in the newspaper. The ability to also deliver video of goals – and hopefully chances at some point – is an extra dimension to our coverage,’ says Silas Bang.

The extra dimension video gives football coverage has also been adapted by other types of media. Among users who started using Veo during the last months, we find the Brøndby IF fan media 3point.dk who records the club’s women’s and youth teams, and the Swedish local football blog TVG Fotboll. 

With this blog post, we hope we have inspired local media, referee clubs, and all other organisations who’s engaged in football to see the value of recording football matches.