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 requires no 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 no-code, natural-language entry point reflects a broader industry push toward agentic AI – systems that can plan, make decisions, and act with limited supervision – which major cloud and AI vendors have promoted as a defining theme of the current AI cycle. Competitions built around games have previously served as accessible on-ramps for complex technologies, and the organizers are applying that playbook to multi-agent systems.

Season format and finals

The Alpha Season will run for seven weeks and feature up to six leagues, each 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. AWS re:Invent is the cloud provider's flagship annual conference, which typically draws tens of thousands of attendees and serves as a showcase for its newest cloud and AI services. 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.

We are excited to announce that our persistent agentic AI platform @hellominds_ , in collaboration with @AWSCloud , is hosting the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a global virtual competition designed to help participants build practical familiarity with agentic AI… pic.twitter.com/Y0uqB3cV3B — Animoca Brands (@animocabrands) September 4, 2026

A practical test of agent orchestration

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 a 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 the 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, a company best known for its Web3 and blockchain gaming portfolio, 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. How the format is received – and whether later seasons follow – will indicate how far game-based formats can go in teaching agent orchestration skills to non-developers.