I think this is the perfect situation for staying competitive for as long as possible without spending or farming tokens. You'll probably be in a weaker league and cup, so you don't need to buy 5 or 6 star players. My advice would be to buy expensive youngsters of about the same quality you have right now. This will be affordable fast trainers. Try to build a young fast trainig team without improving your avg quality too much. A team with a lot of these players will perform a lot better then a similar rated team of aging players, and they should, being a few times more expensive.
I had a similar situation with one team. I spent all my cash, built up in 2 seasons, on 3 young, very expensive 4 starplayers. (DC,MC and ST). I could buy them for 1 T each, and have already gained another star by now. they carry the team. The rest of my team consisted of 1-3 star players, so all improvements after were (just) 3 star fast trainers (which none of the managers at your lvl want, ie cheap), or free agents, you might get lucky there even and find a gem. It is these fast trainers you should train, or play as much as possible.
I strongly believe improving Quality will get you in tougher leagues, so as experiment, I have 1 team where I try to keep the marketvalue as high as possible while keeping quality as low as possible.