How We Photographed 48 Football Teams in a Weekend

Last weekend we covered the Riverside UTD Festival of Football at Wreake Valley Academy in Syston. Two days, four age groups, 48 teams, roughly 480 kids on the pitch across the weekend. Anyone who's photographed football in a youth tournament knows the actual difficulty isn't taking a good picture. It's being in the right place often enough that no team gets missed.

Most festivals like this run several pitches at once, group stage first, then knockouts. One photographer can't be everywhere. Wander round shooting whatever looks good and you'll end up with brilliant coverage of two or three teams and nothing for the rest. That's fine for those two teams. It's a problem for the club relying on print sales, and for every parent who turned up hoping for a shot of their own kid.

So before we touched a camera, we worked out the maths. Riverside ran a round robin, six teams per pitch, four pitches running in parallel across both days. Any three consecutive games on a pitch covers all six teams in that group exactly once. A 45 minute block per pitch guarantees full coverage, no guesswork and no doubling back.

We built the rotation on that. Forty five minutes on Pitch 1, then Pitch 2, then Pitch 3, then Pitch 4, repeating through the morning. Every one of the 48 teams playing that weekend was guaranteed to appear in a gallery.

Knockouts and finals needed a different approach, not less structure, just tighter. Saturday's U7 knockouts ran at 1330 and 1350, U8 knockouts at 1410 and 1430, finals for both at 1450 and 1510. Sunday mirrored it for U9 and U10. Each round played across three pitches at once, 15 minute games with a 5 minute gap between. There wasn't time for 45 minute blocks anymore, so every slot got broken into fixed 5 minute windows, one per pitch. Five minutes on Pitch 1, then straight to Pitch 2, then Pitch 3, whether or not anything had happened yet on the pitch we were leaving.

That's harder to hold to than it sounds. The instinct is always to stay put because a chance looks like it's building. Staying on one game to catch that moment means the next one gets nothing. The five minute cutoff had to hold, every time, for every team to get an equal window through the knockouts and finals.

Kit

We shot the whole weekend in full manual, ISO included. The A7R5 with a 70-200mm f2.8 handled most of the action from distance. A second body, an A7III with a 35mm, was used sparingly and mostly for team group shots, run closer to f5.6 to keep a whole lined up team sharp front to back rather than just the middle row.

Shutter speed on the action varied between 1/1600s and 1/3200s depending on the light, fast enough to freeze a sprint or a sharp turn without blur. The 70-200mm sat around f2.8, wide enough to separate a player from four pitches worth of parents, cones and kit bags in the background. ISO was set manually rather than left to float, which kept exposure consistent shot to shot i

nstead of drifting every time a cloud passed over or a player moved into shade. Autofocus ran on XL centre spot tracking rather than a wider zone; at that age players change direction too fast for a wide zone to keep locked on.

Prints on the day

The photography is only half the job. The other half is making sure people can buy what's been taken while they're still standing on the touchline.

Galleries were built by pitch rather than by individual game, because that's how parents actually search, by which pitch their kid was on rather than a kickoff time. Each day ran eight galleries in total. Four for the group stage, one per pitch. Four more for knockouts and finals across the two age groups running that day, U7 and U8 on Saturday, U9 and U10 on Sunday. All eight went up as QR codes on a laminated sheet mounted on the gazebo, so parents could browse and order without needing to find us first.

Harry ran the print station on site, connected via Starlink sattelite internet, uploading images between games and fulfilling orders as they came in. Standard 6x4s came off a Canon SELPHY, anything A4 and above off a Canon PRO-200. Both walked out of the tent within minutes of an order landing.

None of that eight gallery structure got built on the day. All eight galleries existed before a single ball was kicked, placeholder images in each one, URLs generated and QR codes printed in advance. That's what let the whole thing run self serve. Nobody was waiting on us to set up a gallery mid tournament, and nobody was queuing at a table asking which link to scan. The QR code on the gazebo already pointed somewhere real.

Why it works

A share of every print and download sold at events like this goes back to the host club. That's the part organisers usually care about most, and it's also the part that depends entirely on everything above actually holding up. If a team gets missed because the rotation slipped, or a gallery link breaks because it wasn't ready, the donation shrinks along with it. The maths behind the pitch rotation isn't a nice detail, it's the thing the whole donation model rests on. Get it wrong and the shortfall isn't only missed photos, it's less money going back to the club.

If you're organising a youth tournament and want every team properly covered, get in touch with Chaplain & Co Photography.