Animoca Brands’ AI platform Minds has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to launch the Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a seven-week competition in which players coach teams of autonomous AI footballers using ordinary language.
The competition is free, browser-based and requires no coding. Entrants build five AI agents, a goalkeeper and four outfield players, and give each one a playbook describing its role and behavior. A manager might tell a defender to remain compact and mark the central striker, instruct a midfielder to seek forward passes but recover quickly, or encourage a forward to press high and shoot early.
These prompts are then tested in practice matches, allowing managers to refine the instructions according to the resulting behavior. During matches, managers can also send touchline messages such as “press higher” or “stay narrow.” These are added to the agents’ context rather than executed as direct commands, so an agent can ignore an instruction that makes no sense in the current situation.
In terms of how the game actually works, every two seconds, the simulation provides each agent with the complete match state, including the positions and movement of the ball and players, stamina, score and remaining time.
The foundation model then has one second to select a structured action such as moving, passing, shooting, dribbling, pressing, marking, intercepting or tackling. If it responds too slowly or produces an invalid instruction, its player remains idle for that cycle.
The Minds platform plays a separate role. Every participant receives an Assistant Coach Mind: a persistent AI agent that remembers the team and season, answers questions about the competition, analyzes match summaries and recommends changes to the players’ prompts. It is effectively both a tutorial system and a demonstration of how Animoca imagines its always-on personal agents operating over extended periods.
In terms of the Agentic Football Cup, up to 12,000 teams will be divided across six leagues, with each team playing ten automated matches every weekend from 11th September.
After seven weeks, the six league champions and four wildcard winners will receive flights, accommodation and $500 to attend the final at the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas, which runs from 30th November to 4th December 2026.
There they will compete for prizes of $30,000, $15,000 and $5,000. The $50,000 prize pool belongs to the broader AWS Grand Finale rather than being distributed throughout the online league itself.
Sign up for the Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League here.
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