I’m Simon Moe, founder and CEO of Inneball. Here is a short timeline sharing my story, and the story of how Inneball, the indoor football, came to be.

I was born in a small town called Mosjøen, nestled in a fjord in the middle of Norway. I was an only child living with my parents

Just as I finished kindergarten at age 6, me and my parents moved south to Trondheim where I started in elementary school. I had a passion for sports, and over the years I tried my hands at everything from gymnastics to dancing, skiing, swimming, and football.

I was always a big fan of football, and even though I trained a lot I was always worse than my teammates. Taking inspiration from swimming practice, I started training a lot alone trying to improve my ball control and ball handling. Kicking against the wall in our car park, lone evenings on the pitch, and of course dribbling in the living room.

One year on vacation, my mom bought me a small plush ball with a small bell inside, originally made for babies. She stuffed it with some extra stuffing from a pillow, and sewed it together with some spare fabric from a curtain. This became my favorite toy for many years, and we played football matches in the living room almost daily.

As I got older, I had to decide on a sport to put all my effort into, and despite what you might think, I started training solely for swimming. At age 11 I was one of the best in the country, competing around Norway.

I attended a sporting school between the age of 13 to 15, before moving out alone to Oslo at age 15 to pursue my swimming career at the Norwegian School of elite sports. Graduating in the middle of the Covid pandemic as the athlete of the year, I stayed in Oslo, now focusing only on training.

We played tons of football during the pandemic, both inside and outside, and did things like the “stay at home challenge” where you juggled a toilet paper roll with your feet. This reminded me of my childhood plush ball, which I had left in Trondheim when I moved.  

Having always had a passion for design and business and being very bored having to stay indoors in 2021, I started tinkering with a soft football which I could play with indoors again.

This eventually gained interest from local schools, kindergartens and football-clubs, and with their help I developed, through heaps of prototypes and versions, the perfect indoor football. “inne” meaning “indoors” in norwegian, combined with ball made Inneball.

I am now 22 years old, and a 25-time norwegian swimming champion, having represented Norway in international competitions and setting several norwegian records with my teammates. I continue to pursue my swimming career, while working every available spare minute on Inneball.

I thoroughly believe that if I would have had an Inneball from an early age, my career could have been as a professional football player. My goal now is to share the fun games and play that I had as a kid, and help making every living room, classroom, hospital and indoor space into a football pitch.