The free player is generally the poorest player in your squad and can never develop as quickly as you get promoted, even to be "average" by the following year. That's fine: you may choose to take him develop him or sell him. However both of the academy players are YOUR players to begin with and you should have the realistic option of signing them if you want them. Sometimes you won't because you already have players in that position, but you cant expect managers to hoarde 15-23 tokens solely for securing one player when you don't know which position they play or how many tokens it's going to cost. And the whole point is that everyone doesn't play by the same rules - you don't have the same options on the mobile version as you do on the PC version of the game, where tokens can be acquired much more freely.