To answer the bolded question first, obviously, in a live experience, that would be very, very apparent. I was just saying that the broadcasters have done a decent job of limiting that negative exposure, but I'll give you Leverkusen's poor atmosphere. Now that you mentioned it, I remember several matches where their crowd gets quiet, and that seems to affect the whole team, too.
With that said, I wouldn't say that every plastic club suffers from that. Leipzig have a great home crowd, for example, and it shows in the broadcasts. Hoffenheim have a decent crowd, too, though I'll pay more attention to them as the season goes. On the grand scheme of things, though, these clubs are able to remain at the top and somehow not be restrained in their spending, though we must give credit to them for not blowing their budgets like, say, Hertha Berlin do. Unfortunately, I don't think any of them have really grown except for Leipzig, who've benefitted not only from the regular CL exposure but by being branded as one of Bayern Munich's biggest challengers. I don't remember such narratives lasting as long for a club like Wolfsburg, which actually won the league title with an amazing front 2. Heck, they even had Julian Draxler and Kevin de Bruyne afterwards and still struggled to gain more exposure.
I go back to this because, overall, outside of Bayern Munich and Dortmund, no other German club has really gotten that worldwide exposure. Leipzig are the only club that's seemingly breaking through. Personally, I think the Bundesliga should do a way better job of marketing some of the other clubs and not just putting them aside for the Big 2/3. I look at much of the Bundesliga advertising in both the U.S. and Canada, for example, and they just seem to focus on Bayern Munich (Davies + American players + prior worldwide exposure), Dortmund (Reyna and Pulisic before him + exciting young players), and Leipzig (Adams + exciting young players).
Well for starters Nagelsmann critizied Hoffenheim's fans several times in the press, while he was still there. But I get that the production crew has capable audio engineers, who can mitigate a lot.
I think the it's often overstated how well these clubs are run:
Wolfsburg for example are a bottomless pit, whether it's a good year or a bad year they just keep spending their say 30 million and then they they bounce around the table. Without VW as a safety net and inexhaustable revenue stream they would've gone the way of Schalke long ago.
Leverkusen can just sink €30m on Demirbay, €25m on Schick and Alaraio, €20m on Dragovic, Retsos, Palacios, Paulinho, they can keep missing top four despite having the third or fourth highest wage bill in the country and it doesn't seem to matter much. Gladbach on the other hand usually cant spend more than €10m on a player and they have to get basically everything right all the time.
Leipzig hire half their players from their feeder clubs and when they don't you see plenty of players who don't work out, it's just lost in their scatter gun approach:
20/21: Sörloth €20m, Hwang €9m
19/20: Lookman €18m, Wolf €12m, Candido €8m
18/19: Cunha €15m, Sarrachi €12m
17/18: Augustin €16m, Bruma €15m
That's over €30m per year on average, more than your usual (gross) budget of Gladbach or Frankfurt that they spend on players who add little to nothing to their team. Now of course most of these players aren't complete duds and they can sell some of them for decent money, so on the whole their transfer balance looks good. But it's just worlds apart from the reality of the two aforementioned clubs. When Gladbach or Frankfurt spend €20m they have to be 110% sure he's going to be a key player for them, otherwise that transfer alone can set them back several years, because if things go south they can't just solve their problems with an uncomfortable phone call to daddy.
I actually think Hoffenheim are the closest to a regular club in that regard, because almost all of the players they sign are bought for very moderate sums and they seem to turning a healthy profit, being able to pay out €55m to a certain "atypical silent partner" last year, despite Corona.
I can't really say much about international marketing, because almost all of the content is geo-blocked here, so I never really see it. But going by his Twitter account, Derek Rae, the guy who does the "world feed" seems to have a very good understanding of German football and seems to be aware of even the subtle points. As far as the focus on certain players goes: isn't that how you have to do it? Like if they do the advanced stuff, e.g. a portrait of Christian Streich, is anyone, who isn't already a Bundesliga regular, going to watch that? Or even say to themselves: "well heck, Freiburg are my club now!". It sounds like a reasonable approach to me to advertise with the national heroes, who people feel a personal connection with and then leave it up to the actual "content" to win people over for certain clubs.
GI looking
slightly wild for the second tier.
