Since the genre of online live text commentaries has emerged in the late 1990s, and since it has attracted the attention of linguists some years later, its very novelty has been emphasized. In addition to its characterization as a “new text type” (Jucker, 2010, p. 58), a “novel journalistic genre” (Chovanec, 2011, p. 243) or “a new specialized register” (Werner, 2016, p. 271) in the area of electronically-mediated communication, also the particular research questions addressed to this genre often focus on its novelty. Live text commentaries are analyzed as a hybrid genre combining traditional forms of spoken and written sports discourse (Werner, 2016), as transfer of an established communication format to a new medium (Hauser, 2008) or as a manifestation of increasing media convergence in the era of digitalization (Hauser, 2010). Other studies relate the emergence of live text commentaries to a more comprehensive “shift toward orality in written and, more generally, public discourse” (Pérez-Sabater et al., 2008). A diachronic dimension is therefore usually inscribed to the research on live text commentaries. Nevertheless, diachronic studies in the proper sense, i.e. empirical studies on the emergence and the development of this genre, still lack. Existing contrastive research focuses on cross-linguistic (Pérez-Sabater et al., 2008; Meier, 2019a) or cross-generic (Lewandowski, 2012) aspects, but most of these studies work with rather small data sets that only represent one point in time. However, since the genre has now existed for more than 20 years and can be traced back without a gap in the archives of the online providers, it has long been suitable for diachronic research.