To be honest, your best method is going to depend on how much time/money you have available for the game. It will also depend on your league/server.
For example, I've been lucky enough to have 12 seasons in a league/CL with 4 of my friends. It makes it more interesting, but also more competitive. Therefore, my tactic for the first 5 seasons was to add 1-2 good young players every season and make the rest of my squad up with older players, as they were much cheaper and easier to win at auction. They stay in your squad for only 2 seasons at the most, however. I also never bought in the first week.
I stayed in touch with my friends who were buying tokens (I didn't win many trophies, though) and learnt how to play the game properly, which included token farming.
Now I have the resources and guile to compete with token buyers and have overtaken them, but it took 5-7 seasons of losing a lot and trying lots of different things to find out what worked for me and what didn't.

A friend of mine was on such an easy server, he won the league every year, barely dropping a point, with a team around 10Q less than the 5 of us. However, when he got to level 9, he suddenly came up against good teams/managers and was thoroughly unprepared. He has almost quit already...a classic case of Flowers for Algernon on T11. He got used to winning easily and can't appreciate the fact it's now difficult for him.