German soccer fans don’t often agree on much. Few, however, can deny that the 2006/2007 Bundesliga season was more exciting and suspenseful than it had been for years. The following chart illustrates the ups, downs and overall drama of the season’s 306 matches.

R	Team	GP	W	D	L	GS:GA	GD	P	Record
1	VfB Stuttgart	34	21	7	6	61:37	24	70
2	Schalke 04	34	21	5	8	53:32	21	68
3	Werder Bremen	34	20	6	8	76:40	36	66
4	Bayern München	34	18	6	10	55:40	15	60
5	Bayer Leverkusen	34	15	6	13	54:49	5	51
6	1. FC Nürnberg	34	11	15	8	43:32	11	48
7	Hamburger SV	34	10	15	9	43:37	6	45
8	VfL Bochum	34	13	6	15	49:50	-1	45
9	Borussia Dortmund	34	12	8	14	41:43	-2	44
10	Hertha BSC Berlin	34	12	8	14	50:55	-5	44
11	Hannover 96	34	12	8	14	41:50	-9	44
12	Arminia Bielefeld	34	11	9	14	47:49	-2	42
13	Energie Cottbus	34	11	8	15	38:49	-11	41
14	Eintracht Frankfurt	34	9	13	12	46:58	-12	40
15	VfL Wolfsburg	34	8	13	13	37:45	-8	37
16	1. FSV Mainz 05	34	8	10	16	34:57	-23	34
17	Alemannia Aachen	34	9	7	18	46:70	-24	34
18	Bor. M’gladbach	34	6	8	20	23:44	-21	26

In the last column of our chart, we used sparklines to visualize each team’s complete record for the 2006/2007 season. A blue upward whisker stands for a win, a red downward whisker for a loss and a black dash in the middle for a draw. The first horizontal rule shows which teams will automatically play in the Champions League, while the second reveals which team can still qualify. The third marks which teams will play in the UEFA Cup and the fourth lists the “unlucky losers” who are headed down to the relegation for the upcoming season.

Do you remember when Schalke lost in week 31 and 33 (to Bochum and Dortmund – local rivals, no less!) which ultimately cost them the title? Or Hamburg’s weak start (or bad luck streak – the jury is still out on that one) that made Hamburg fans fear that their team might be forced into the minor league? Hamburg, the only team that has been in the Bundesliga every year since its inception and has never been demoted to the relegation in the history of the Bundesliga! And we in Nuremberg certainly won’t forget the long series of ties at the beginning of the season or the 3:0 dream win against record champion and local rival, Bayern Munich. When you see a complete record of the season in front of you, it is amazing how these and so many other stories quickly come back to mind.

As we already discussed in a previous posting, sports fans in general tend to be fans of dense information. Today’s example demonstrates that you don’t even need much space to post a game-by-game account alongside the usual statistics of a soccer season.

The the sparklines in this chart were generated using SparkMaker, our add-in for Excel.

We have even saved a PDF copy of this table to ensure that you or other Bundesliga fans have plenty to talk about until the 2007/2008 season starts in August.