Every grassroots coach has had the same thought at some point. We should really be filming our games. Then you look up Veo, see the guts of €3,000, and quietly close the tab.
The XbotGo Chameleon is the company’s upgraded AI tracking camera, built to sit your phone on a tripod, track the play automatically, and hand you usable footage without a parent standing behind a camera for ninety minutes. It costs a fraction of Veo, needs no subscription, and promises smarter tracking than the original gimbal I reviewed a while back. The real question isn’t whether it’s clever. It’s whether it’s finally good enough to properly replace an expensive camera system for a club like mine. Not quite, but it gets a lot closer than anything at this price has any right to.
How much better is the tracking this time round
Noticeably better, yes. Locking onto play is quicker than it was on the original gimbal, the framing stays smoother through midfield, and there’s a lot less of the random drifting that used to catch you out. Structured phases of play, patient build-up, a settled back four, a team working the ball through the middle, are where it looks genuinely composed.
Chaotic phases are where the limits show. A long diagonal, a quick counter, or a scramble in the box can still shake it loose for a second or two, because the system is reacting to the ball rather than anticipating where it’s going next. That’s the real gap between this and a proper multi-lens tower setup. Here’s a clip from a Summerville Rovers match that shows both sides of it, the smooth midfield tracking and the odd moment it has to catch up.
Credit where it’s due though, XbotGo already have a new model called the Falcon in the pipeline. Hopefully we can get our hands on one down the line and give it a proper test.
Filming pitchside with Summerville Rovers
Used properly, on a full-size grass pitch, in the middle of a chaotic Sunday match, it holds up well. In good daylight the footage is clean, the stabilisation is solid, and the panning is smooth enough that you’d forget nobody was operating a camera. For player clips, coaching review, quick highlights for a club Instagram, or the inevitable WhatsApp parent group, it does the job without fuss.
Under floodlights, you’re leaning entirely on your phone’s camera rather than the Chameleon itself, and that’s where the cracks appear. I ran it with a Redmi Note 14 and a Samsung S25 Plus at different sessions, and the difference in poor light and bad weather was stark. Whatever phone you’re mounting on it matters just as much as the hardware doing the tracking.
The app and the no subscription selling point
The app is genuinely one of the best things about this. You get live streaming to Facebook or YouTube, in-app highlight editing, and cloud storage included, with no mandatory subscription sitting on top of it. That last part matters more than it sounds. Veo charges the guts of a grand a year just to keep using the software you’ve already paid for the hardware to run, which is a very corporate way of doing things and not remotely built with grassroots budgets in mind. Not being locked into a monthly or annual fee is, on its own, a big enough reason for a small club to look at this over the alternative.
XbotGo Chameleon vs the original gimbal vs Veo
Set the three side by side and the differences make sense once you see them written out plainly. The original AI Sports Gimbal, which I reviewed here, remains the cheapest way in at around €300, decent for casual clips and underage games but limited on wider pitches and prone to losing the play under sustained tracking. The Chameleon costs more, somewhere in the €400 to €500 region depending on bundle, but that extra spend buys steadier tracking and better wide-pitch coverage, even if it’s still not chasing the accuracy of a dual-lens system across a full-size pitch. Veo sits in a different category altogether, with hardware alone running north of €3,000 before you even factor in the subscription needed to use it properly.
None of the three are trying to be the same product. The gimbal is for content. The Chameleon is for match filming that actually holds together. Veo is for clubs doing genuine performance analysis with the budget to match.
Battery life you can trust
You’ll get roughly one full match out of it before you need to start thinking about charging, so bring a power bank and treat it as essential kit rather than a nice-to-have. Both the phone and the gimbal drain fast under constant tracking, and there isn’t much more nuance to it than that. It’s heavy on the juice, but for what it replaces, that’s a fair trade.
Overall this means it suits amateur clubs, underage academies, coaches building development footage, and anyone covering grassroots sport who wants realistic, shareable match content without torching the kit budget. Summerville Rovers is exactly the kind of club this was built for.
It’s not the right fit if you need a full tactical breakdown with no blind spots, you’re working in a scouting environment where every frame counts, or you’re doing genuine semi-pro performance analysis. That’s still Veo’s patch, and will be for a while yet.
The Goosed verdict
The XbotGo Chameleon is the first version of this that feels properly usable for serious grassroots football. It’s a considerable step up on the gimbal, more stable, more confident, more refined, but it’s still fundamentally a grassroots tool rather than a professional broadcast system. It’s smart, it’s affordable, and it’s realistic about what it’s trying to be, which is probably the sweet spot for ninety per cent of amateur clubs out there.
