Based on a corpus of about 30.000 reviews of football players, this article analyses grammatical, lexical and pragmatic features of evaluative language use with data driven methods. The succinct reviews of the players’ performances, which shall explain and validate the assigned player marks, are analysed in a contrastive perspective in order to identify lexical means of evaluation as well as its scaling. Moreover, the distribution of these means over the single marks is determined. Against the background of a sociological model of evaluation constellations in the discourse domain of football coverage, the empirical findings are interpreted pragmatically. They show how the reviews, which are written for the fans, try to evaluate as objectively as possible and, at the same time, take subtle subjective stances.