Houston's sports bars filed $23.4 million in mixed-beverage receipts in June against $16.6 million in May. Up 41.1%. Across the rest of Harris County, the same month was down 3.1%.
In a month with six World Cup matches at NRG, that is the least surprising sentence we will publish all year. The interesting part is what happens when you break the 41% apart. It does not distribute across the category. It barely distributes at all.
The 41% lives in one ZIP code
Every venue in 77003 filing above $75,000 — all nineteen of them, sports bar or not — is up 83% as a block, to $6.41 million. That is EaDo, and the free FIFA Fan Festival ran there from June 11 and drew 551,313 people.
Pitch 25 +540%, from #103 to #5. Little Woodrow's on St Emanuel +177%. Shell Energy Stadium +134%, in a month the Dynamo played zero home matches. Texas Tailgate Sports Bar & Grill +132%. Truck Yard +63%. Rodeo Goat +36%.
None of that is a story about sports bars. It is a story about being walkable from a beer garden with 551,313 visitors.
The suburbs got nothing
Now the same category, away from the tournament. These are sports bars in the plainest sense — screens, wings, taps — and June looked like May.
Bombshells, six locations, +7.1%. Pluckers, seven locations, +5.2%. Scary Canary, three locations, −6.5%. Sam's Boat Galleria −30% and Seabrook −30%. The Stadium in Spring −17%. Stars Sports Bar in Katy −12%. Mak's −11%. Rock Neutney's −14%. Cedar Creek −30%.
Twenty-three of the 84 sports-forward venues we can compare finished June below their May. Having the format was worth nothing on its own.
Two operators broke the geography rule
Kirby Ice House — three locations, +88.1%, $2.57 million. Memorial, Heights and Upper Kirby all landed in the county's top 14, and none of them is in EaDo. @kirbyicehouse.htx
Little Woodrow's — nine locations, +79%, $3.21 million. Every single one is up. The range runs +30% in Braeswood to +177% in EaDo. Nine for nine is not a location advantage, it is a decision made once and executed everywhere.
And one independent: The Phoenix on Westheimer, +182% and up 469 positions to #83. Montrose, not EaDo. No chain behind it. It published a match schedule and called itself an official watch location, and the receipts followed.
The beer tell
Every venue in this set that gained more than 60% runs beer at 40% of receipts or higher. Shell Energy Stadium 70%. The Phoenix 66%. Little Woodrow's EaDo 52%. Pitch 25 48%. Kirby Ice House 47%. The Flying Saucer, up 42%, is at 80% beer.
The rooms that won were built to move volume at a low check, on a Tuesday, at noon. That is a different business from a cocktail bar and it had a different June.
What an operator should take from this
The category did not win. Three things did, and they stack: proximity to where people already were, programming that told them you were open for a noon kickoff, and a format that could serve beer fast enough to make a full room worth having.
Kirby Ice House and Little Woodrow's had two of the three and no proximity at all, and still put up 88% and 79%. Meanwhile a well-run sports bar in Katy with all the screens in the world finished the month down.
Houston has another seven-figure event calendar coming. The chart is fairly clear about what earns from one.
Data: TABC Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts, data.texas.gov, dataset naix-2893, May–June 2026, Harris County. Names as filed by the permit holder. The sports-bar set is 84 venues filing $75,000 or more in June, identified by concept from the filed name; comparisons use only the venues where both months support one.
County comparison excludes venues whose May or June filing failed validation, so it covers $169.4M of the month rather than the full $175.2M. 127 permit rows are excluded from all rankings: each carries a total with no liquor, wine or beer behind it, and the identical total is filed by unrelated venues in the same month.
The publisher holds an ownership interest in one or more venues appearing in these rankings. All venues are ranked by filed receipts, without exception.