While China’s team keeps flopping on the sidelines, Beijing just unleashed AI-powered humanoid robots to battle in a soccer match.
Beijing just hosted what might be the future of sports. On Saturday night, four teams of clunky bipedal machines faced off completely solo with no humans pulling strings to show off some moves on the soccer pitch.
While China’s men’s national team is already booted from the 2026 World Cup and fails to generate much interest, these bipedal machines managed to score points with fans and engineers alike.
According to organizers, a defining feature of the match was that each robot functioned completely autonomously, relying on AI-driven decision-making without any human intervention.
Armed with high-tech eyeballs, these bots locked onto the ball and navigated across the field with sharp precision.
China is aggressively advancing its development of AI-powered humanoid robots, turning sports, such as marathons, boxing, and now soccer, into a lab for real-world testing.
Booster Robotics, the company behind the match, built the metal skeletons for all four participating university squads, while each team cooked up its own brainpower, such as custom AI playbooks for spotting, scheming, positioning, nailing passes, and tweaking moves for speed and punch.
Cheng Hao, founder and CEO of Booster Robotics, emphasized safety as a core concern in integrating humanoid robots into human environments.
"In the future, we may arrange for robots to play football with humans. That means we must ensure the robots are completely safe,"
Cheng said to the media.
“For example, a robot and a human could play a match where winning doesn’t matter, but real offensive and defensive interactions take place. That would help audiences build trust and understand that robots are safe.”
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