Bayer Leverkusen is seen in Germany as a plastic club by a lot of fans, mostly because they have distanced themselves from their working class roots.

This is not the reason though. Leverkusen is s smallish city, right next to Colone and they allways had a limited draw and were a “smaller club”, that never had any major success and whose biggest accomplishment it was to win a match here and there against 1.FC Köln.

When Leverkusen rached the 1st division, in the 80s, FC && Gladbach were two of the biggest clubs in the country and scraped up the fans of the region, pretty much all the Leverkusen fans I know are from the city. From what I know and thats not really, really deep Leverkusen upped their investment, after they survived the fist few years in the league, Bayer invested 2 million deutsche Mark into new players, wich was a lot back then and established themselves as one of the better/top third teams in the league. Fans of other teams then slowly grew to dislike the club, that only had an attendence of around 10k, in a time, where most of the cash clubs made came from selling tickets, being bankrolled by a company, it then became a lot worse, when they were contending in the late 90s, early 2000s.