Academy still gives out a maximum of 4 players, also you re not guaranteed any player from your academy to be a fast trainer or anywhere near that level of training.
Every change they made in the last 6 years is to force you to spend money to be competitive.
One of the biggest reasons why i quit 1 year ago and 3 years ago was because I spent too much time on the market replacing my key players that became too old to maintain their stars.
I genuinely don t understand why they don t raise the number of players you can bid every 4 minutes.
Also, the fact that as a lvl 3 player you can bid against a lvl 50 player is very stupid because obviously they have more tokens than you.
A good addition to the auctions market was the fact that they return your tokens if you don't win the players you bid on.