The Washington Post has an article about teams of college students who program Sony AIBO Robotic Dogs to play soccer against each other in teams of four. 
While Beckham‘s job is not yet jeapordized, the cool thing from an AI perspective is that “once the humans flip the switch, the robots are on their own.” They compete in RoboCup whose stated goal is to “by the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.” RoboCup also has competitions with wheeled soccer bots (of varying designs) and have a humanoid league in which the Honda ASIMO appeared. The students in the above article are preparing for the four-legged international championship coming up in July of 2003 in Padua, Italy. (This was an accepted Slashdot submission of mine that turned out to be a dupe!)
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