In modern football, previously unknown quantities of (real-time) data are available through digital tracking technologies and increasingly complex data-analytic algorithms. For some years now, data-based match analyses have also been used in football coverage. This paper asks how the ongoing datafication of football is reflected in the linguistic-communicative characteristics of football coverage which still has to fulfil entertaining functions beyond a purely factual description of the games. On the basis of large corpora of live text commentaries and match reports, the paper analyses how raw data is processed linguistically and multimodally and what are the interactions between a quantified, data-oriented view of the game on the one hand and a more interpretative view on the other. In addition, new forms of automated journalism in the field of football coverage will be considered.