Football clubs are the kind of institutions which are looked up to in a community. As pillars of their surrounding areas, there has always been some obligation to embody the town or city they come from and serve as a source of local pride.

But as a sport with mass appeal in the modern world, competing with rivals doesn’t just mean being better than them on the pitch. It also means dominating off it, too. And as the internet grew and social media became a normalised part of the everyday lives of fans, it presented an opening for clubs to expand their reach far beyond their own localities and even their own countries. There were whole new continents to explore and millions of people to turn into fans, and specifically fans of your club.

As exciting and enticing as that might sound to football executives, it’s also quite difficult. Sport is something of a universal: every country has its own sporting favourites and its own culture around it. For any sport, trying to move beyond your normal sphere of influence is difficult because cultural sensitivities are so nuanced. It requires a great deal of effort and planning, you can’t just turn up and hope to win hearts and minds.

One of the best at using social media as a tool to do just that over the last few years has been Bayer Leverkusen.

Building on the back of the popularity with their now-departed goalscoring star Javier Hernandez in his homeland of Mexico, the German club realised the potential of putting the effort into expanding their reach into North America, as Mexico and the sizeable Hispanic population in the United States offered the perfect target audience – one that was both new and worshipped their new signing. They set about creating a Spanish-language social media team and attempted to cash in on their opportunity.

It worked: the Bayer 04 Spanish account has almost 100k followers, even after the departure of Chicharito to Premier League club West Ham United, who have been trying to build their own brand in North America using similar tactics.

But it’s now about whether Leverkusen can keep up the level they had before.

With their natural ‘in’ having left the club, in July 2017 alone the Bundesliga club’s social media accounts took a significant dip, losing thousands of followers in the US and Mexico across all the social platforms as their Facebook account took the biggest hit. And yet, the numbers of fans still following aren’t exactly small: there will have been some who just followed for Chicharito and nothing else, but there will also have been some who genuinely fell for the club, too.

That’s because it’s never totally about one player, and the strategy was always to grow as a club in North America, not just to cash in on one player. Over the last three years, Leverkusen have toured the US during the Bundesliga’s famously long winter break, whilst US TV channel Fox Sports’ German football coverage showed them more often than most when it came to picking games to air live. Other US media outlets followed suit by devoting features and other coverage to the team. Growing that without Chicharito is clearly now the challenge, but they have at least created a base.

New signing Lucas Alario, an Argentinian striker recently signed from River Plate might also be able to help launch the club further off that ready-made platform. So far in only four starts for the club, he’s scored two goals in a promising beginning. And with a lovely-looking website with content in English and Spanish as well as German, the club seem to be trying to build even more upon what they started in 2015 when Hernandez signed.

What it shows is that there’s no shortcut, and that hard work is definitely necessary in order to win the hearts and minds of new fans. Leverkusen capitalised well when they had their Mexican star to call upon for North American visits for two seasons, but now it’s about making sure that the fans are here for more than just updates on a player they liked anyway. It’s now about making sure they’ve actually touched people in a meaningful way, not just with a player who now plays for a different club. And if they do that, it’ll be a massive success story.