Within the perspective of the stratified linguistic reality (cf. Badurina and Kovačević 2001) and the functional stratification of the Croatian standard language (cf. e.g. Silić 2006), the language of journalism, in all its varieties, is traditionally distinguished. This paper will focus on the contemporary written Croatian language of sports journalism, specifically the language and discourse of Croatian football columns in newspapers and online in the 21st century. In the last twenty years, several main armlets of Croatian football columnism can be recognized. One consists of columnists for whom football topics are usually only a starting point for broader sociological-phenomenological insights with a pronounced subjective attitude (e.g. Tomislav Židak, Boris Dežulović). The second armlet consists of the sports journalists’ columns, which can roughly be divided into the more traditional ones (e.g. Robert Matteoni, Predrag Jurišić, Dražen Krušelj) and those of the younger generation, who some 10-15 years ago introduced a completely new discourse, almost scientific in nature, into football journalism (terminology, approach to soccer tactics and psycho-physical characteristics of individual soccer players, citing kinesiology literature) and different jargon (e.g. Mihovil Topić, Vice Karin, Bernard Jurišić). The paper will try to confirm the assumption about the existence of these armlets, and special attention will be given to the third group’s columnists’ discourse and jargon, who started publishing around 2010. That discourse’s features will be compared to those that are usually considered to be characteristic of a football column and reports (cf. e.g. Udier 2005, Silić 2006). Existing notions about the characteristic written language about football have been somewhat revised.