We are tombola
A little more about us
People are at the centre of everything we do, both on site and internally. Our aim has always been to keep the sense of community no matter how much tombola grows.
As a business we’ve grown from 14 staff in 2006 to a whopping 800+ over 9 countries today, but we still like to make sure we stay connected and collaborate as much as ever.
Our story
Let's start at the beginning
One sunny day (ok we’re not sure if it was sunny because it was the 1950s and it’s Sunderland we’re talking about) Father Jerimiah O’Callaghan walked into the Edward Thompson stationery shop. He asked if they could source some bingo tickets for a game he was running to raise funds to fix his Church roof.
A young Frank Cronin found the priest some bingo tickets, but in doing so he thought “wouldn’t it be better if I made these myself?” And that’s just what he did - he started printing bingo tickets!
UK bingo boom
Edward Thompson’s great great nephew, Frank Cronin, kept the family’s legacy alive when he took over the business in 1959. As the popularity of TV sets in people’s homes grew, disused cinemas were converted to bingo halls and the UK bingo boom started to take hold.
150 million bingo tickets a week
By the 1970s Edward Thompson were printing 150 MILLION bingo tickets a week. And the kids today think they do a lot of dabbing…
Like father, like son
Frank’s son, Phil Cronin, left the family business to set up on his own in 1994. His entrepreneurial flair led to the creation of Intermedia Games, which focused on the world of promotional games. The business worked alongside TV gameshows and newspapers and produced Syndicates, The Sun newspaper’s biggest ever game.
However, the times were a’changing as paper boys stopped pushing scratch card games into the tabloids in the early hours of the morning - something bigger was on its way.
The internet
Intermedia Games had great success all over the world designing, and with the help of Edward Thompson, printing instant win promotional games for TV networks, magazines and newspapers. Then came one more in a series of “what if we did it ourselves” moments. Phil saw the opportunity of this new-fangled tech thing called “the internet” and set about moving those newspaper games that had worked so well on (literally) paper to online in December 1999.
tombola
With our new online presence, we decided to give ourselves a new identity, with a company name you might recognise today: tombola!
What followed was a big but short lived success, resulting in Intermedia and tombola expanding into the top two floors of Wylam Wharf (Sunderland), followed quickly by worrying times when the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000s. The sister brands went from 20 staff back down to five.
Not one to give up, Phil had work to do to rebuild the business. He persuaded a national newspaper, who he had a long-standing working relationship with, to launch a suite of new online games and eventually online bingo!
Going it alone
tombola ran online bingo for a national paper for two and a half years and then we decided to go it alone. At midnight on the 26th August 2008, a group of staff gathered in the Wylam Wharf offices. It was an exciting night and there was never a doubt in our minds that the players and community we’d created would follow us to pastures new. We quickly became Britain's biggest bingo site.
Europe
Staying true to our roots the tombola campus remains in Sunderland overlooking the river Wear. But we didn’t stop there! We invested in our international brands and are very proud of the in-country teams that help us take our Mackem business all around the world.
We started in Italy, making a home for tombola in Milan, before venturing to Spain and setting up shop in Madrid. We now have operations in Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands and Malta too, along with our largest overseas office on The Rock of Gibraltar. It’s been quite the journey from that little stationery shop.
tombola arcade
We started to wonder what slots might look like if tombola made them. Sticking to the low stake model we’ve always used in our bingo games, we launched tombola arcade in July 2016 and it’s now a huge part of the business. Our goal was to bring the community we’d created around our bingo games to slots and we like to think we’ve managed to do this!
The “we can do it ourselves” ethos that came from the Edward Thompson stationery shop flowed right through to tombola arcade and we built everything in-house.
Sponsorships and awards
Since the launch of tombola in August 2008 we’ve sponsored a few little things that you might have heard of: Emmerdale? Loose Women? I’m A Celeb...? And of course Sunderland AFC, our home town football club!
We’ve also won a few shiny awards, from safeplay to best bingo operator, and we have had the hangovers from the ceremonies to prove it.
Flutter
In 2022, as sole owner of tombola, Phil Cronin sold the business to Flutter. As one door closes another one opens and joining Flutter offers exciting opportunities for the years ahead at tombola.
The future’s bright as we continue to lead the bingo-led market and carve out the next chapter in our history.
Do you want to play a part in our next milestones?