You can plan and be very frugal with tokens, and try to save for such event as bidding wars, buy your youth Academy players (Ive been trying this and they are usually very good).. look at all hours and find when there is less people bidding.

If you have failed to promote it takes longer to get to the top, and you can drop down the same way if you find yourself in that situation where you are faced with too many big investors, you can elect to "tank" a season for the purpose of strengthening your team the economical way. I haven't done this but there are several threads about this on here, having failed to promote before though I can see how it would help, as your players stars don't drop, though they slow down still from age.