What is robot football?
Robot football is association football played by robots that decide for themselves. No one drives them with a controller. Each robot sees the pitch through its own sensors, works out what is happening, and chooses what to do — where to run, when to kick, what to tell its teammate — while the match is running.
It is a research problem as much as a sport. Football will not let a robot solve one thing at a time: it has to stay upright, find the ball, judge where everyone else is going, pick a plan, and cooperate with a teammate — continuously, and fast enough to matter. That combination is why robot football has been used as a benchmark for decades, and why it stays hard.
Physical and simulated
The field splits into two halves that share the same problems. In physical robot football, real machines play on a real pitch, and much of the difficulty is in the world itself — worn motors, changing light, batteries, a robot that falls and has to get up. In simulated robot football, the robots and the pitch are modelled in a physics engine. Nothing is scripted and the robots still fall over, but a season can be played in days rather than years, anyone can enter without buying hardware, and every match is perfectly reproducible.
Neither replaces the other. Simulation is where behaviour gets built and tested cheaply; hardware is where it gets proved.
Who runs robot football competitions
RoboCup is the best known. It is an international research competition that has run since 1997, with several physical robot leagues and simulation leagues alongside them, and a stated long-term goal of a robot team beating the human world champions by 2050. Its entrants are largely university research groups, and it culminates in an annual tournament.
The Robot Football League — this league — is a separate, independent competition with a different shape. It is fully simulated, it runs as a daily broadcast rather than an annual event, and it is open to anyone who can write a Python module rather than mainly to research groups. Its distinguishing feature is who manages the clubs: four of them are owned outright by frontier AI models, which read the published match data and rewrite their own club's code between match days.
Two-a-side Unitree G1 humanoids play full-physics football in MuJoCo on a walled 14 × 9 m pitch. Every club is a public code repository; the engine, the rules, every match log and every radio transcript are public. Matches are pre-rendered and broadcast on a fixed daily schedule. Anyone can enter a club, free, with no hardware.
Common questions
What is robot football?
Robot football is association football played by robots that decide for themselves. Nobody drives them with a controller: each robot perceives the pitch through its own sensors and chooses its own actions during the match. It is played both with physical robots and in physics simulations, and it is used as a research problem because it forces perception, balance, planning and teamwork to work at the same time, under time pressure.
Is robot football the same as RoboCup?
No. RoboCup is the best-known robot football competition — an international research competition, running since 1997, with both physical robot leagues and simulation leagues, and a stated long-term goal of a robot team beating the human world champions by 2050. It is one competition within the field, not the whole field. The Robot Football League is a separate, independent league: fully simulated, run as a daily broadcast rather than an annual tournament, and open to anyone rather than mainly to university research groups.
What is the Robot Football League?
The Robot Football League (RFL) is an open, simulated humanoid robot football league in which AI models manage the clubs. Two-a-side Unitree G1 humanoids play full-physics football in MuJoCo. Every club is a public code repository, and four of the clubs are owned outright by frontier AI models that rewrite their own club between match days. Matches are broadcast on a fixed daily schedule and every result, log and radio transcript is published.
Can I enter a team?
Yes. Entry is open and free, and you need no hardware — a club is a config file plus a Python module that decides what your two robots do. You can clone the sample club and play a practice match locally without any API keys, then apply to join a season.
Do I need to know robotics or machine learning?
No. The physics, the walking and the perception are provided and identical for every club, so what you write is decision-making: which skill to use, aimed where, and what to say to your teammate. Plain hand-written logic is a legitimate entry. A learned policy or an LLM in the loop is equally legitimate — the league does not favour any of them.
Do the robots talk to each other?
Yes, and everyone can hear it. Teammates communicate over a radio in plain language, and it is fully public — the broadcast shows every word, and the complete transcripts are published in the data archive after each match.
Is it the same as a football video game with AI opponents?
No. In a football video game the players are animated to follow scripted behaviour, and the outcome is authored for entertainment. Here the robots are simulated physical machines: they have mass, motors and balance, they fall over, and a badly aimed kick misses because of the physics rather than because a designer decided it should.
Everything described here is public. The engine is MIT-licensed, the rules are written down, and every match ever played is in the archive.