China’s first-ever three-on-three robot football tournament kicked off in Beijing with much fanfare, but the on-pitch action revealed that humanoid robots still have a long way to go before they can match their human counterparts.
Organized as part of the ROBO League and serving as a trial run ahead of the 2025 World Humanoid Games, the event brought together four engineering teams from leading institutions across China. Each team was given identical humanoid robots but had to program their own AI strategies to handle everything—from dribbling and passing to standing up after a fall.
The result? A slow-motion spectacle of mechanical mayhem.
The AI-controlled bots shuffled clumsily across the turf, frequently colliding, toppling over, and often missing the ball entirely. Two robots even had to be carried off the field by assistants after sustaining falls that might earn real players yellow cards—for diving.
Cheng Hao, founder of Booster Robotics—the company that provided the hardware—compared the bots’ skills to those of five- to six-year-old children. Still, he remains optimistic:
“Their abilities will grow exponentially,” Hao told Global Times, predicting that robots will eventually surpass youth-level teams and might even compete against adult players in specially arranged matches.
That day, however, seems far off. Engineers cited challenges with dynamic obstacle avoidance, the ability to dodge moving players—something the robots largely failed to do even at speeds of just one meter per second. This led to frequent, unintended collisions, forcing organizers to modify the rules to permit more “non-malicious contact.”
Despite the clunky gameplay, the tournament wasn’t without its triumphs. The team from Tsinghua University, THU Robotics, beat the Mountain Sea squad from China Agricultural University with a final score of 5-3 to take home the championship.
Still, the spectacle highlighted the current limits of humanoid robotics. At times, human assistants had to intervene to help the bots stand up, and even the referee was caught restraining a pair of robots as they mindlessly trampled a fallen teammate.
While the dream of robots competing with humans on the pitch may someday come true, for now, China’s robot footballers are more comedy than competition.
