Tombola International Plc sister sites

Tombola (International) Plc Information

Who are Tombola International Plc?

If you’re asking that question, you can’t be much of a bingo fan. Tombola is well-known in the UK – and much further afield – for being an enormous bingo site full of original content. Since the successful launch of the original Tombola Bingo site many years ago, the brand has been expanded through the introduction of Tombola Arcade. Since then, the brand has only grown bigger and stronger – and yet, at the same time, Tombola International Plc has lost an element of its independence.

The version of Tombola that exists in the here and now is an enormously popular brand, but it’s part of something even bigger than itself in the shape of Flutter Entertainment. Read on for the full story of Tombola International, from the beginning to where it is today.

An overview of Tombola International Plc

Tombola, in its current incarnation, was founded in 2006 in the city of Sunderland, in England’s North East. That’s where the headquarters of the company can still be found today, although, for tax and administration purposes, the “official” HQ of Tombola is in Gibraltar. The same can be said for the “official” head offices of plenty of casino network companies, all for the same reason.

The websites operated by the company are available in several countries aside from the UK, including the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Denmark and Portugal. All of the games you’ll find on Tombola’s websites, regardless of whether we’re talking about Tombola Bingo or Tombola Arcade, are developed in-house by the company. That means Tombola doesn’t have to depend on third-party providers to keep its games catalogue stocked for its millions of players. As of the time of writing, it’s thought that the company employs around one thousand people.

Tombola International Plc History

Although the current version of Tombola has a history dating back to 2006, you can trace the company’s roots back a little further than that if you so desire. A registered company with the Tombola name was incorporated by Phil Cronin in Sunderland in 1999. Cronin knew a thing or two about the bingo business – until 1995, he’d worked in his family’s printing business. The Cronin family’s speciality was printing bingo tickets for bingo halls over the country, which they’d been doing for generation after generation all the way back to the 1960s.

If you check the Tombola website – which is a great source of information if you’re interested in the brand – you’ll find that it actually claims a history that dates back to the 1950s, which is a decade further than our sources indicate. Back then, in Tombola’s own words, children ran through the streets of Great Britain “with a spring in their steps,” and Elvis Presley was still causing a stir with his hips on television, while the world was black and white. It’s an attempt to play on the “family owned” aspect of the Tombola business, even though that isn’t the case anymore. We’ll have more on that a little further down this page.

The first version of Tombola that ever appeared online popped up in late 2005 – but it wasn’t launched under the Tombola name. Instead, Cronin approached The Sun newspaper and offered to provide online bingo services on its behalf. The Sun loved the idea, and so Cronin was given the go-ahead. After a successful soft launch, the company (and website) that would eventually become Tombola launched as Sun Bingo in January 2006. The Sun put its massive marketing machine behind the brand, while the nascent Tombola provided everything on the technical side of things, from the website to the games and the people who designed and maintained them. That meant that Tombola and Sun Bingo were indivisible in their early years. For the sake of clarity, there’s no connection whatsoever between Tombola and Sun Bingo today.

The relationship between Tombola Bingo and The Sun continued until 2008, which is when Cronin decided that he no longer needed the newspaper’s support. He kept the website and all of his staff and struck out independently. That was the beginning of the Tombola that we know today, with JackpotJoy briefly replacing Tombola as a service provider to Sun Bingo.

Becoming a Flutter Entertainment Brand

In January 2022, the ever-growing iGaming giant Flutter Entertainment plc parted with £402m to acquire Tombola in its entirety. That marked the end of Phil Cronin’s time in charge, as he stepped away from the company altogether when the deal went through. Becoming a Flutter Entertainment brand means that Tombola is now part of what’s arguably the biggest single iGaming entity in the world, incorporating several household names.

The origins of Flutter Entertainment can be traced back to 2015, which is when the sports betting giants Paddy Power and Betfair merged. That merger alone was enormous, but Flutter Entertainment has only grown larger since then. The full roster of brands under the Flutter umbrella includes not only Paddy Power, Betfair and Tombola but also FanDuel, PokerStars and all of the Sky Betting & Gaming brands. It’s an international company with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

The scope and scale of Flutter Entertainment is staggering. According to the most recent figures available, which take us to the end of 2022, there are more than 21,000 people working for the business. Those people, and the websites and betting shops they help to operate, bring in revenue of £7.6bn per year. The UK is still a major point of focus for Flutter and the companies within it, but you’ll also find Flutter brands active in Australia and the United States of America, where it’s exploring the opportunities presented by the sports betting market. There’s no sign that the company is done with its spate of acquisitions, either – so long as it keeps being given the go-ahead with its acquisitions, anybody could be next.

As for Tombola – it’s still business as usual. Joining the ranks of Flutter hasn’t resulted in any major changes to the company’s websites or its ethos. It still makes the same guarantee on its website that it’s always made – players will always be able to buy bingo tickets at Tombola Bingo for as little as a penny, and the chance to win up to £20,000 in prize money will always exist. Even as part of a globally significant corporation, Tombola markets itself as a community-driven iGaming brand – a place where players are at the heart of everything that happens. Those players are well-served by customer service operatives; on average, it’s possible to get telephone support at Tombola Bingo or Tombola Arcade within eight seconds of dialling the number. If you’re happy to settle for using live chat instead, you should be connected to a live agent within a mere four seconds.

Tombola International Plc and the UK Gambling Commission

Even though Tombola International Plc is now part of Flutter Entertainment, it still maintains its own UK Gambling Commission licence. The most recent version of the licence was granted in November 2014 and is held under account number 38613. Both the .co.uk and .com extensions of the Tombola and Tombola Arcade websites are listed on the licence, which is clean as of the time of writing. When we say a UKGC licence is “clean,” what we’re really saying is that the operator is yet to be censured, sanctioned or otherwise penalised by the regulator for its conduct, which is exactly how Tombola intends to keep it. The same can’t be said for some of the other Flutter Entertainment plc brands, but the sins of one don’t affect them all.