my %teams = do { local $/; next unless <YB> =~ /^([A-Z\s]+?):\s*(.+)$/
+mg; };
[download]

You may want to use dragonchild's solution because it is easier to understand.

You will need to read up on "do" to understand it better. do is not a loop, using next will only exit the block. Let me try to avoid using do.

"Slurping" a file means reading all its data into a string. There alot of ways to do that, search for file slurping on Super Search to understand it better.

Once you have the file data the regexp is easier to understand:

my $teamdata;
for my $line (<DATA>) {
    $teamdata .= $line;
}

# If you assign a global match to a list, it stores
# everything that matched in parenthesis to that list.
# A hash can be created using a list eg: (key, val, key, val)
my %teams = $teamdata =~ /^([A-Z ]+): *(.+)$/mg;
[download]

The problem with the code I supplied is \s matches whitespace, including a newline. If you replace \s with just a space character, it will skip the bad lines.

The important thing to learn is how the global match /<regexp>/g can return a list of results, or the number of matches depending on what you assign it to. See perlretut (ie Extracting matches), perlre, search here, etc.

i definitely need to read more but your solution works well for me
thank you