You can use tokens to speed up the building process, but will still have to wait the same duration as the rest of us for your youths after the academy is built/upgraded. You'll then get two youths every now and then, every 12 days at max level. The worse one can be signed for free, and either sold on, or trained up and then sold on. The better one needs tokens to be signed, I've seen around 15 to 21 tokens.

It depends what you mean by good deal, but in the long term, you'll make a profit from your ticket sales and selling on youths, and you have to upgrade all your facilities evenly anyway.