I've never spent money on this game and I had bad and good seasons, usually depending on my market choices and how good were my opponents. (and troll results too).
It would be ok for me if my team had bad and good times, even famous teams with great players have them. My only doubt is that nobody is sure about how this game works! If I knew what makes my team play like s**t all of sudden I would be glad to fix it. Maybe change formation and tactics? Send them to vacation to raise morale? Sometimes the game it's too inconsistent to actually help you finding the winning formula.

I don't need the source code for this game, but some more transparency on how it works would work.

BTW I agree on the fact that maybe it's not all about token buyers. Yes it helps a lot, but you can do it even without, I smashed through some seasons with no money spent.