In this paper we analyze all the live commentaries on the French national football team broadcasted on television on the occasion of the World Cup championships in France (1998) and in Germany (2006). We primarily focus on how sports commentators are able to evoke strong emotions in the audience through their live running commentaries. Since our approach is centered on both the linguistic and discursive strategies used by sports commentators to intensify emotional response during the match, neither prosody nor prosodic variations typical of live running sports commentaries are considered in this study. We deal therefore with linguistic markers, namely lexical features of live football commentaries given in French, and with the most recurrent linguistic strategies intended to evoke primary emotions, such as surprise, happiness, fear, sadness and anger.