Minds, the persistent AI agent platform developed by Animoca Brands, has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a global competition designed to give participants hands-on experience with agentic AI.
Registration for the inaugural Alpha Season is now open, with league play set to begin on September 11, 2026. Entry is free and does not require coding experience. Participants will build a five-a-side team of AI agents and use natural-language instructions to define their players’ tactics, roles and behaviors. Each participant will also receive an Assistant Coach Mind to support tactical development throughout the tournament.
The Alpha Season will run for seven weeks and feature up to six leagues, with each league accommodating as many as 2,000 teams. Teams will play 10 matches per week across Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Six league champions and four wildcard winners will qualify for the in-person finals, creating a field of 10 finalists.
The finals will take place in Las Vegas during AWS re:Invent, scheduled for November 30 to December 4. Finalists will receive travel support covering flights and accommodation, a $500 payment and access to the AWS conference. The final competition will offer a total prize pool of $50,000, with $30,000 going to the champion, $15,000 to the runner-up and $5,000 to third place.
Beyond the sporting format, the competition is intended as an accessible environment for experimenting with agentic AI. Participants will have to translate strategic goals into natural-language instructions and coordinate multiple autonomous agents operating as a team. The format provides a practical setting for testing prompting, role assignment, decision-making and agent orchestration.
The initiative also reflects the growing effort to make agentic AI accessible beyond professional developers. Minds is designed to let users deploy and direct persistent AI agents without having to manage local servers or underlying hardware and software infrastructure. By placing those capabilities inside a competitive game, the organizers aim to lower the barrier to experimenting with multi-agent systems.
For AWS, the tournament provides a community-facing demonstration of how users can interact with and coordinate AI agents. For Animoca Brands, it offers a practical application of Minds while expanding exposure to agentic AI through a format familiar to a broad audience.
With registration already underway, the Alpha Season will provide an early test of how participants use natural-language control to manage teams of autonomous agents in a competitive virtual environment.
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