Locomotive’s $24 million Bingo Loco scaled from a Dublin basement in 2017

This is the real plot twist behind the World Cup’s loud, friendly “heartland” surprises: a quietly enormous business already built a template for exactly that kind of togetherness. Locomotive’s Bingo Loco, launched by Irish co-founders Craig Reynolds, Will Meara, and Stephen Lawless in 2017, has grown into a $24 million ticket sales business selling over a million tickets each year across 300 cities. Nine-and-a-half years later, the rest of the world is only now showing up to experience what Locomotive spent years learning customers would actually pay for.

The connection starts with what visitors noticed right away. A German tourist named Maximilian Kirch flew into Dallas during the World Cup this summer, bought a cowboy hat, and told Reuters he wanted to “experience more of it.” A Swiss fan from Zurich posted on Reddit about how friendly and outgoing people are. Meara, one of the co-founders, has felt that mismatch between the America people think they know and the America they encounter once the operator brings them to places “like on any given weekend” where you can find yourself in North Dakota or rural Virginia. That moment of recognition is not marketing fluff. Locomotive’s business model is engineered around it.

So how did a traveling bingo party in a Dublin basement turn into a repeatable machine for connection? Start with what Bingo Loco actually is. For two-and-a-half hours, attendees sit at long communal tables in a format the co-founders describe as Hogwarts-style. A live MC works the crowd while a DJ spins throwback anthems from the '90s and early 2000s. Random audience members get pulled onstage for lip-sync battles, air guitar competitions, and comedy bits, with prizes that range from international holidays to air fryers. Reynolds even calls it “the lowest-IQ game possible,” and the point is deliberate. It lowers the cognitive load so people can talk, laugh, and participate without needing to be “good” at anything.

In 2017, Reynolds, Meara, and Lawless convinced 100 friends to show up on a rainy Thursday night. Before Bingo, they tried other ideas, including yoga disco nights and hot tubs inside nightclubs, which Meara notes were “not great for insurance.” Bingo clicked. By today, Locomotive runs about 2,000 shows annually across 15 countries and 300 cities, generating roughly $24 million in ticket sales and about $8 million in profit, according to records reviewed by Fortune. The company says it did this without a dollar of outside investment, and it built growth by leaning into millennial appetite for nostalgia, connection, and a touch of childhood.

Underneath the games, there are two strategic theses the co-founders articulate. The first is timing and cultural memory: millennials are the last generation with a shared musical memory. Reynolds argues that “monoculture” faded when the internet fractured culture into a thousand niche streams, but millennials still walk into a room with '90s and 2000s nostalgia and discover they all “know this one.” The second thesis is emotional, and it reads like a business case for why live events still win: millennials, Reynolds and Meara say, aren’t just nostalgic. They are lonely. They grew up before smartphones, carry physical memory of being genuinely present, and now live in a hyper-connected world that can still feel disconnection-heavy. In a post-AI world, they argue, people seek connectivity more than ever, and live events can deliver togetherness that can’t be replicated outside the room.

The third insight is where the scale gets its teeth: geography and calendar gaps. Big entertainment promoters like Live Nation and AEG own venues and ticketing and typically book tours six to eight months out. Reynolds says what they cannot do is fill the “two-, three-, or four-month” empty spaces in between, especially without in-house solutions for those dates. Locomotive, in contrast, can schedule because its format does not require fans to travel far. Reynolds describes drives of “maybe 20 to 30 minutes.” In Dallas-Fort Worth alone, Locomotive operates in eight or nine micro-cities simultaneously, including Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Arlington, and Fort Worth. The company also “heat-maps” demand and says it does not see huge cannibalization when it runs multiple nearby locations.

This is why the World Cup’s emergence in “Middle America” matters commercially, not just culturally. Locomotive built its own granular maps of American entertainment demand, and it found that warming up to soccer was not an anomaly but a pattern that could be operationalized. Kansas City, once questioned as a soccer market, became what one reporter called “the heart of soccer” during the tournament, with warm fans and barbecue that got mythologized. Locomotive’s thesis is that underserved markets are not underserved because people do not care. They’re underserved because the industry plan assumes people will travel, and it leaves the in-between weeks and micro-geographies to whoever is flexible enough to serve them.

If you run a board or a portfolio, the strategic stakes are simple: customer attention is now purchasable, but only when you engineer the conditions for shared participation. Bingo Loco’s $24 million in ticket sales is a specific proof point that “togetherness” is not a vague mission statement, it is a product feature. Locomotive also shows that you can outflank the incumbents without owning every venue, by filling calendar gaps and using nearby-area logistics to make participation easy. And as the World Cup and other big events increasingly spotlight local communities as the main character, companies that already designed around that reality will be the ones customers recognize first.