Kellen Tallada is the Co-Founder and CEO of Futstrikers, Inc., the youth-focused performance soccer ball brand he started in early 2025 with co-founder Hamayun Babar.

The idea didn’t start as a brand. It started as a logistics problem. Kellen’s son was playing competitive club soccer and losing balls — at practice, at tournaments, on the way home from games, all of it. Every week meant another trip to the store, another $50 or $60 disappearing from the family budget, and another reminder that the balls his son was actually using either weren’t real match balls in the first place, or were and cost three times what families could justify. Kellen wanted to solve the inconvenience first: a monthly subscription that put fresh, match-quality balls in front of club families on autopilot. That became Futstrikers Club.

The brand grew from there. Once Kellen and Hamayun started talking to other parents, coaches, and club directors paying the same price for the same problem, the gap stopped being an inconvenience and started looking like a category nobody had built. Today, Futstrikers is the only brand built specifically for the youth club player — every age and every game format. The 2026 Tekno24 and Sonic24 match balls carry both FIFA Basic and NFHS Authentication marks, and they’re available in Size 4 for the 7v7 and 9v9 formats kids play at ages seven through twelve — an age range almost no other brand offers a real match ball for — as well as Size 5 for full-sided U13 through U18 competition. Futstrikers Club, the company’s direct-to-consumer membership platform, gives club families year-round access to certified match-quality equipment at prices built for how families actually buy.

Kellen brings the brand and operational discipline to the company. Hamayun, with generational ties to world-class soccer ball manufacturing, brings the product. Together they’re building what no global brand has built before: a soccer ball company specialized for the youth competitive market.

Before Futstrikers, Kellen built and continues to operate a marketing and branding agency now in its tenth year. He has founded and scaled multiple multi-million dollar direct-to-consumer ecommerce businesses, served twice as CEO of fintech startups, and currently holds a C-suite technology role at a multi-brand holding company in the sports industry. The discipline of building consumer brands from zero to scale — and the conviction that the youth club market deserves a brand built specifically for it — is what he brings to Futstrikers every day.

Kellen writes about brand positioning, the youth club soccer market, parent decision-making in club families, and the macro forces reshaping how American families spend on competitive youth equipment. His writing is grounded in being a customer first — he watches his son go through the gear bag every week, and writes for the parent he was before he started the company.