China Hosts First Humanoid Robot Football Match

Beijing has hosted China’s first-ever football tournament featuring fully autonomous humanoid robots.

The event, dubbed Robo League, served as a warm-up for the upcoming World Humanoid Robot Games, scheduled for August 2025.

While autonomous robot football matches have been held globally since 1996 as part of the RoboCup initiative, this was China’s first tournament with full-sized humanoid robots.

Unlike other competitions where robots may receive operator commands or rely on simplified builds, the Chinese teams deployed robots that played entirely independently, without external control during the matches.

The final saw four teams compete, with THU Robotics from Tsinghua University defeating Mountain Sea from the China Agricultural University 5–3. Each team fielded three robots on the pitch and kept one in reserve. Matches were played in two 10-minute halves with a brief intermission.

Organizers noted that the current level of gameplay roughly matches the skills of five-year-old children, but they’re confident that, as the technology advances, robots will soon be able to play with greater complexity and finesse.