So there you go: the last match day of the 2010-2011 season has been played, and the 18 Bundesliga teams is divided into two camps – the winners and the losers. Nevertheless, deciding which teams belong to which category is a matter of personal interpretation – and here’s mine.

After having recently spent most a blog post cracking jokes at the (considerable) expense of vulgar nouveau riche football clubs, I thought I should even things out a bit by admitting something: tradition, as nice as it is to have, is no better at buying success than good, hard cash. A team that has been demonstrating this over and over again in the last couple of weeks is the Hamburger Sportverein, or HSV. This Hamburg team, with their long and great history, lost by a very poor 0:3 to VfB Stuttgart on the weekend; the week before, they only just limped to a disappointing 0:0 draw against Hannover Sportverein 1896, despite the fact that they were playing at home and that Hannover are supposed to be the smaller and less important HSV from the North German plain.

The 29th match day of this Bundesliga season was a day of big-name duels. There was Frankfurt-Bremen, Stuttgart-Kaiserslautern and Mönchengladbach-Cologne, all of which were fights between relegation candidates – the latter, of course, was also something of a local Rhineland derby.

There was the Bavarian derby duel, too, with Munich up against Nuremberg. Attention was focussed pretty much exclusively on Bayern’s president Uli Hoeneß, though, who had had a real go at the club’s own fans last week after they gave him some flak for wanting to save TSV 1860, the other Munich club.

This time Bundesliga Blog’s showing you some (low-budget) videos. On Saturday, Oliver and Johannes went to Commerzbank Arena Frankfurt, watching the southwest derby between Eintracht Frankfurt (red shirts with black stripes) and 1. FC Kaiserslautern (white shirts). The fight against relegation drew a 49,400 crowd and the atmosphere created by the fans was top-class (Video #1).

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Unfortunately, both teams played a pretty poor match with nearly no chances. The best one was missed horribly by Kaiserslautern striker Srdjan Lakic in minute 89 (Video #2).

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It’s a question we football fans should probably ask ourselves more often: just why is football such a popular sport? What is it about football that makes so many people watch it week after week, year after year? Why do I go to football matches? My answer is: emotions.

Football excites people because it is a display of human emotion in its rawest form; it’s about people struggling, fighting, giving their all, conviction and enthusiasm pulsing through them; it’s a sport where tragedy and disappointment is always just a fumbled kick away – and a match can turn to tragic at any second of its ninety minutes. All of this means that when things go well, it can make for unforgettable moments in the lives of players and fans alike. These golden moments can happen anywhere, anytime a football is kicked: but some clubs and some stadia see them more often than others.

Last week must have been difficult for all of you Bundesliga junkies: the season had just got going, and suddenly there was a pause for international games; and they weren’t even high-adrenaline games, either. We were forced into watching teams like Denmark, Belgium and Azerbaijan. That’s all over now, though: play started again on the weekend – and if you’re anything like me, you couldn’t wait!

Come on, quick! Now’s the time to get rid of players you don’t need and then go and get some new ones! Why? Because after the qualifying games for the Champions League and the European Cup, it’s clear that all the German teams involved have made it into the group phase of the continental competitions. There’s new money available, the first games are out of the way and decisions about location have been made: so now it’s a game of musical chairs, with Bremen hoping Silvestre will set down on their seat, Hannover wanting to tempt Hajnal from Dortmund, Wolfsburg grabbing Diego and Demichelis looking to sit down anywhere except at Munich – he doesn’t get along well with the trainer. Really, any team with ambitions to take the Champions’ League should be looking to sign him: after all, ex-Bayern defenders are as close as you can get to guaranteed title success (see Lucio at Inter Milan last season).