I did not mark the player as favorite. I wanted the player and I did not wait for the last minutes to bid in the initial round, unlike the other manager that won that auction. I made an early bid and I waited for the auction to end, where in the meantime I was doing other things but still checked the status of the auction periodically by coming back to the auction page. A user bade in the last minutes, and when I was on the verge to bid in the first knock-out round, there was a 5-second jump in the count-down and the auction was over.
As for the advice from you and Medo, I do refresh the page sometimes. For relatively long time auctions, I do close the page and come back a few minutes before the auction is about to end. But, it is not convenient to keep on refreshing the page each time an auction that you are in is about to end. You might even lose more players this way because it takes some time to reload this game, and also you might get errors while reloading. Nordeus needs to fix the lagging in their connections or the overload on their servers. The servers and internet connections seems to a bit overloaded these days with all the changes and so on. The game itself seems to be overloaded probably due to the recent changes which explains why there is the 'game is low on memory' error.