In Brief:
- Minds by Animoca Brands and Amazon Web Services opened registration for the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a free browser competition whose inaugural Alpha Season begins Sept. 11.
- Managers write plain-English playbooks for five AI agents that play five-a-side. The US$50,000 prize pool splits US$30,000, US$15,000 and US$5,000 among the top three.
- Ten finalists get flights, accommodation and US$500 to play the final on stage at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nov. 30 to Dec. 4.
Minds by Animoca Brands is taking registrations for a football competition in which no one touches a controller. Managers type instructions, and five AI agents decide what to do with them.
The AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League runs in collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Entry is free, the game runs in a browser and no coding is required. The inaugural Alpha Season starts 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 ↗
Prizes total US$50,000. The champion takes US$30,000, with US$15,000 and US$5,000 going to the first two runners-up.
How a match works
Each entrant builds five agents, a goalkeeper and four outfield players, and writes a playbook for each one describing its role and behavior in plain English. A defender might be told to stay compact and mark the central striker. A forward might be told to press high and shoot early.
Those prompts get tested in practice matches so managers can rewrite them based on what the agents actually do.
Once a match starts, the game server emits a decision point every two seconds and calls all 10 agents in parallel with the full game state: ball position, every player’s position and velocity, stamina, score and clock. Each agent has one second to return one of 11 structured commands, including MOVE_TO, PASS, SHOOT, DRIBBLE, PRESS_BALL, MARK, INTERCEPT, TACKLE, CLEAR and IDLE, plus goalkeeper-specific actions.
Miss the deadline and that player idles for the tick. Return an invalid instruction and the same thing happens. There are no retries during a match.
Touchline coaching is advisory rather than binding. An in-match message such as “press higher” or “stay narrow” is added to an agent’s context instead of being executed as a direct command, so an agent can ignore an instruction that doesn’t fit the situation. Untrained squads still take the field. They just play worse.
The Assistant Coach
Every participant gets an Assistant Coach Mind, a persistent agent that remembers the team and the season, answers questions about the competition, analyzes match summaries and recommends changes to the players’ prompts.
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said the company built Minds “to make personal AI agents accessible and easy in everyday life.” Siu said players will get 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
The Alpha Season runs seven weeks across up to six leagues of a maximum 2,000 teams each. Every team plays 10 matches a week, spread across Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Up to six league champions plus four wildcard winners advance, making 10 finalists. They receive flights, accommodation, US$500 and access to AWS re:Invent 2026, which runs Nov. 30 to Dec. 4 in Las Vegas.
The virtual league sits alongside an in-person developer track. That version is a technical workshop built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and the Strands Agents SDK, where participants ship the same five agents in code and play two-minute 5v5 matches against another team. More than 100 of those events have been completed or scheduled across India, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the United States, and completing one qualifies a team for the global league.
Developers of any level can join the workshops. No AI or machine learning experience is required, and organizers encourage participants to bring a non-technical teammate.
The design brief behind the whole thing is deliberately unforgiving. Parallel multi-agent invocation, structured output and a hard timeout are the same constraints production agentic workloads run under. Here they play out at 60 frames per second on a football pitch.
