The way I see it is that Nordeus splits the game into financial tiers.

There is the 10 token bracket for managers with season starting quality of 80%. Especially with lots of friends, they can get good players for 10 tokens or less through negotiations. Often low quality managers can leach young players from bigger teams that have lower quality players used for secondary low-quality line-up (for tanking or whatever) or special sponsors tasks.
There is the 69 token bracket for managers with season starting quality of 110% (this is the category I play). In this category, managers can by players through scouting or some academy limited training. This is advantageous for developed managers playing in high division associations that guarantee a substantial income each season.
And then there is the 100+ bracket where managers just spend whatever real money they can afford to buy tokens for Personal Trainers, hundreds of greens, or insane youth academy coaching.

In my opinion, the negotiations has to be reworked. It basically leaves out any dedicated players that are serious in the game unless the manager purposely stays under 100%. With association rewards and daily income, anyone's team will easily grow to where a 80% starter is not good enough anymore. I feel that even a 120% negotiations cap would make the game much more a community game since then there will be much more serious managers shopping and trying to find "suppliers". But obviously Nordeus doesn't want that because they have to protect income from the scout's transfer offers. I would support removing scouting transfers in exchange of a 130% negotiations limit.