"We should have scored more goals" was the only criticism Holger Stanislawski could come up with about his St Pauli team after the final whistle, when 24,000 happy supporters – minus a few hundred disgruntled away fans, who attacked the police – went ballistic.

Their 3-0 demolition of FC Köln had been a long time coming – it was only their second win in three months – but the manner of the victory made it worth the wait. "They simply ran all over us from the first minute," said Köln's coach Frank Schaefer.

"It was our best game [of the season]," Stanislawski added after seeing St Pauli play with the kind of high-tempo aggression that any self-respecting promoted side need to produce at home, and they played really, really well. The German-Ghanaian Charles Takyi caught the eye with two great goals, the first a 25-yard screamer into the top corner, and celebrated the double with a unique four-and-a-half finger salute. The upper part of his ring finger is missing.

Criminologists may suspect the brutal involvement of Chinese triads, but Takyi's misfortune is the result of a simple accident. "When I was 15, I climbed over a metal fence to get a ball and got caught," he said with a smile. "They tried to stitch it back on but it didn't work."

The 26-year-old's digital deficit has not stopped him from developing into "one of the best number 10s in the league", according to his team-mate Gerald Asamoah, but it does have another side-effect. "[Instead of shaking my hand] they hit me over the head," Takyi joked. "Maybe they think it doesn't hurt because of my hairstyle."

St Pauli's goalkeeper Thomas Kessler was in splendid mood, too. "I'm off to pick up a few cold Astra beers from a petrol station," the 25-year-old former Köln player said. "The boys lit up a firework at times, I'm so proud of them. We're moving in the right direction now."

Stanislawski had dubbed the game "a top clash [seen] from below" during the week. The three points have made it unnecessary to the turn the table upside down, at least for the time being: Pauli are 14th, six points clear of an automatic relegation spot.

It was the perfect rehearsal for Sunday's derby against Hamburg, the fixture that has been exciting the city for a couple of weeks now. The club from the red-light district have already struck the first blow against their wealthier rivals. "HSV is curable" read one banner at the Millerntor.

Some less happy punters were keen to prove a point, too. "Good intentions are no substitute for good deeds" read a big banner in the south stand. But that one was not about a football at all, strictly speaking.

The banner refers to a dispute between a section of traditionally minded supporters who call themselves Social Romantics and the self-styled alternative club.

A couple of days before Christmas, the romantics published a petition – "It's enough" – that demanded limits to commercial activities in and around the partially rebuilt stadium and a return to "our values and our understanding of football and its experience of it".

It added: "Our St Pauli, an island in the world that's only concerned with the financial exploitation of each and everyone" and referred to "our otherness in the market place that is professional football". The Jolly Rouge, a skull and bones on red background, is their coat of arms. Around 4,500 fans have already signed the petition.

The SRs are not naive. They accept that the club need to refinance to pay for the new main stand, and to ensure the squad is good enough to stay up. "You can't make €50m for the new stand and €40m for the playing staff with two chippies," said the St Pauli president Sfefan Orth. He has promised that the Millerntor will never be "a Disneyland full of ads" but for the SRs, St Pauli have already sold out.

They criticise the installation of 200 business seats and VIP boxes, one of which has been bought by Susis Showbar, a strip club from the neighbouring Reeperbahn. Women were pole-dancing during matches and stripping when St Pauli scored.

Following protests, Susis agreed to desist during games and to tell its employees to put more clothes on, but the fans want the showbar's people to get out altogether. Other squabbles concern the sponsoring of line-up announcements, another VIP section made to look like a shanty-town shack, a LED screen with (paid for) rolling text messages from fans, and music over the Tannoy. "We want five to 10 minutes before the game when the acoustics in the stadium belongs to us," the petition says.

Orth has promised the Social Romantics seats on a new commission that will evaluate commercial activities. The hard-core fans are not appeased. They want more concessions and have threatened a stadium boycott. "We will initiate actions that you don't even dream of", the SR homepage says.

St Pauli have taken the protests seriously but do not seem quite sure what to make of them. Inside the ground there are more nuanced views, too. On the Back Straight, the traditional base of the older supporters, they do not like the non-stop chanting of the younger south stand ultras. "It's monotonous and drowns out other chants," one of them complained to Financial Times Deutschland. The ultras are "atmosphere Nazis" said another.

The supporter liaison officer Stefan Schatz, on the other hand, thinks "the Back Straight is dying a little at the moment, in terms of chanting". Simple demographics might be to blame. The radical rebels of yesteryear have become old and comfortable. "They want to smoke a joint, drink a beer and take it easy," says a local journalist, Rainer Schäfer.

St Pauli will do well to reconcile the factions without scaring away more well-heeled punters.

Commerce versus fan culture: it is the basic dilemma experienced by most clubs in the Bundesliga, but this one is being played out in a much louder, more extreme fashion. "We will pay more attention in the future," promised Orth. Whether that is enough to fend off more serious action remains to be seen, For the moment, a few more wins would not go amiss in what are volatile times.

Talking points

• Champions-in-waiting Dortmund embarrassed Wolfsburg and won 3-0 at the Volkswagen-Arena. If you want to know how, simply pick some random superlatives out of a hat or the dictionary. They're all apt, all true. Jürgen Klopp's denials, meanwhile, are fast approaching Comical Ali territory. "If Weidenfeller gets injured, we have a huge problem!," he warned. "If Hummels gets injured, we have a huge problem! If Bender gets injured, we have a huge problem!" Too right. "And if Felix Magath buys Sahin, Götze, Großkreutz und Klopp before the derby on Friday, if the South Stand collapses and the city of Dortmund is abolished by law, then it could really be a very close call," added Süddeutsche Zeitung.

• Arjen Robben did what he does best on Saturday: he went straight for the jugular. Unfortunately for Thomas Müller, the victim of the Dutchman's attack, the final whistle had long gone by that stage. Bayern won 3-1 away to Werder Bremen after going 1-0 down in the 47th minute but Robben, scorer of the equaliser, was unhappy. Müller had enraged him with dismissive gestures and complaints during the game, when the 27-year-old had, as usual, chosen the selfish, less promising option a good few times too often. "I hate that," said Robben, who appeared to squeeze Müller's throat in decidedly unfriendly fashion on the pitch. The matter seems now resolved.

• Bremen were left reeling and complaining about a disputable Luiz Gustavo hand ball that the referee adjudged unintentional. "It would have been the 2-1 for us and a different game and Tim Wiese wouldn't have been sent off," argued Torsten Frings. It's a tempting hypothesis but neglects the fact that Bremen, for all their fight and courage, fell prey to their by now tragically predictable fragility at the back and always looked like conceding. They slip further into the dark, damp Bundesliga basement, seemingly intent on keeping faith in manager Thomas Schaaf. "I don't see any life savers out there," said Klaus Allofs, allegedly in reference to the transfer-market.

• New Hoffenheim-signing Ryan Babel showed why he was once feted as the new Arjen Robben in the VeltinsArena: he brilliantly ran the Schalke 04 defenders ragged, forgot to look up for better positioned players and took meek shots that were easily saved by Manuel Neuer. "At times he looked like an Oranje star, at times like a bin man", was Bild's verdict in view of TSG's orange away shirt.

• Isaac Vorsah's header after four minutes sealed the win for 1899. Schalke manager Felix Magath was at a loss to explain his side's utter passivity but fought back by treating the last few hours of the transfer window as an episode of Supermarket Sweep: the arrivals of Ghana midfielder Anthony Annan (Rosenborg Trondheim), Brazilian defender Danilo Avelar (Karpaty Lviv) and Greek striker Angelos Charisteas were, ahem, sensationally followed by former Bayern reject Ali Karimi, who's now been bought by Magath for a second time. At this pace, Harry Redknapp's historic record from his time at West Ham – 143 players bought and sold in seven seasons – won't survive August.

Results: Leverkusen 2–0 Hannover, Nürnberg 2–0 Hamburg, Bremen 1–3 Bayern, Schalke 0-1 Hoffenheim, Wolfsburg 0–3 Dortmund, St. Pauli 3–0 Köln, Kaiserslautern 0–1 Mainz , Stuttgart 0–1 Freiburg, Frankfurt 0–1 Gladbach.