In Brief:
- Registration is now open from Minds by Animoca Brands and Amazon Web Services for the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a free browser-based competition whose first Alpha Season kicks off Sept. 11.
- Five AI agents play five-a-side while managers write playbooks for them in plain English. A US$50,000 prize pool is divided US$30,000, US$15,000 and US$5,000 across the top three.
- The 10 finalists receive flights, accommodation and US$500 to contest the final on stage at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4.
Nobody picks up a controller in the football competition now accepting entries from Minds by Animoca Brands. Managers type out instructions, and it is five AI agents that decide how to act on them.
Amazon Web Services is collaborating on the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League. There is no entry fee, no coding requirement, and the whole thing runs inside a browser. The debut Alpha Season opens Sept. 11 at agenticfootballcup.ai.
Forget the controller. Now, you can manage a football team by writing what you want, and your AI players actually do it.
The sharper your prompts and words, the better they play.
Free-to-play, with a trip to Vegas and a share of US$50,000 on the line. 🏆Minds by Animoca BrandsView on X ↗
US$50,000 is on the table in total. US$30,000 goes to the winner, while the two runners-up collect US$15,000 and US$5,000.
How a match works
Every entrant assembles five agents — one goalkeeper and four outfield players — then writes each of them a playbook, in plain English, spelling out its role and how it should behave. Instructions for a defender might be to hold a compact shape and mark the central striker; a forward might be told to press high up the pitch and shoot early.
Practice matches let managers put those prompts through their paces and rewrite them once they see how the agents actually behave.
After kickoff, a decision point fires from the game server every two seconds, calling all 10 agents at once and handing them the complete game state: where the ball is, the position and velocity of every player, stamina, the score and the clock. Within one second, each agent must reply with one of 11 structured commands — MOVE_TO, PASS, SHOOT, DRIBBLE, PRESS_BALL, MARK, INTERCEPT, TACKLE, CLEAR and IDLE among them, alongside actions reserved for goalkeepers.
A player that misses the deadline simply idles for that tick, and an invalid instruction produces the same outcome. Nothing gets a second attempt mid-match.
Shouting from the touchline is advice, not an order. A message sent during play — “press higher” or “stay narrow” — lands in an agent’s context rather than being carried out as a direct command, which leaves the agent free to disregard guidance that doesn’t suit the moment. Squads that were never trained still get to play. They are simply worse at it.
The Assistant Coach
An Assistant Coach Mind comes with every entry: a persistent agent that retains knowledge of the team and the season, fields questions about the competition, works through match summaries and suggests revisions to the players’ prompts.
Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu said the company created Minds “to make personal AI agents accessible and easy in everyday life.” According to Siu, the competition gives players hands-on experience managing and orchestrating a team of AI agents in a competitive game setting with guidance from the Assistant Coach Mind.
Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI and emerging technologies at AWS, said: “We’re at an inflection point for agentic AI, and it’s more important than ever for builders to get real, hands-on experience creating and orchestrating agents.”
Season format
Seven weeks make up the Alpha Season, spread over as many as six leagues that cap out at 2,000 teams apiece. Each team contests 10 matches per week, played across Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Ten finalists emerge from up to six league champions plus four wildcard winners. Each gets flights, accommodation, US$500 and access to AWS re:Invent 2026, held Nov. 30 to Dec. 4 in Las Vegas.
Running in parallel with the virtual league is an in-person developer track — a technical workshop built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and the Strands Agents SDK. There, participants write the same five agents in code and face another team in two-minute 5v5 matches. Over 100 of these sessions have already run or been scheduled in India, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the United States, and finishing one earns a team a place in the global league.
The workshops are open to developers at any skill level. Prior AI or machine learning experience isn’t needed, and organizers actively suggest bringing along a non-technical teammate.
None of the design is meant to be forgiving. Invoking agents in parallel, demanding structured output and enforcing a hard timeout are precisely the constraints that production agentic workloads live with. The difference is that these ones are enforced at 60 frames per second on a football pitch.