The World Cup is just now discovering Middle America’s big heart. These Irish bingo kingpins built a $24 million business knowing it all along

A German tourist named Maximilian Kirch flew into Dallas for the World Cup this summer, bought himself a cowboy hat, and ate barbecue. “Of course I’m wanting to experience more of ​it,” he told Reuters. A Swiss fan from Zurich posted on Reddit: “Something new for me is ​how friendly and outgoing everyone is.”

Will Meara knows the feeling. He’s been having it for two-and-a-half years.

“There’s a great Twitter account … the Freddy LA one — it’s a German guy and everyone’s seeing America through his eyes and seeing real America,” Meara told me recently. (The account has sadly already run its course, with Freddy commenting on Instagram that he shut it down because “too many people seem to have a problem with us having a genuinely good time here in the country.”)

Meara said that he was surprised, just like Freddy was, when he finally met the real America. “I was obviously familiar with the New Yorks and LA’s of the world, but because of the cities and towns that we now operate in, like on any given weekend, I could find myself in North Dakota, for example; I was there a couple of weeks back, or rural Virginia. And it’s really getting to see the heartland of America and how great the people are and how friendly they are.”

Meara is one of three Irish co-founders behind Locomotive, the live entertainment company, and its flagship product Bingo Loco. One of them, Craig Reynolds, moved to Denver in 2025, and they headquartered their North American operations there the next year. Reynolds said he’s spent the past year doing what no major entertainment promoter had thought worthwhile: driving to Frisco, McKinney, Plano, college towns across the South. Going to LSU football games. Tailgating at Ole Miss. “I’ve been to like Death Valley and LSU or Ole Miss and really experienced the heart of American culture, tailgating, getting to know folks and hear stories,” Meara said. “I think it’s great that now the World Cup is here, other people are having that exact same experience and seeing what the real America is.”

That real America — gregarious, community-minded, hungry for shared experience and dramatically underserved by the industries nominally paid to entertain it — is the foundation of a quietly enormous, global $24 million business. Reynolds, Meara, and their co-founder, Stephen Lawless, found it first. The rest of the world is only now showing up.

Locomotive’s flagship product is called Bingo Loco, and the name undersells what it actually is. For two-and-a-half hours, attendees sit at long communal tables — Hogwarts-style, Reynolds said — and play bingo while a live MC works the crowd, a DJ runs throwback anthems from the ’90s and early 2000s,........

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