improving my ticket sales
No offense but I'm not sure why you'd bother with this when you barely have any tickets for sale. I mean every teams start off with 6000 right? You've been here for like 8 seasons and only build over 1k more seats. That's neglecting the biggest source of income in this game. The best way to earn money is by building more seats. At least 12-15k, optimally 21k (no more than that).
I was trying to get my economy strong by training & flipping players
I hate to break it to you but after factoring in staff and player salaries, this isn't really that profitable at all, especially when you had to pay to buy the trainee and play him off position. A lot of people get happy when they sell their trainee for a good price, but they tend to forget that they spent money to get the player to where he is, and they would have saved money had they not trained him for cash. Let's take Joseph Boucher as an example. He's bought for 25k. 1 season's salary is 44k for him. That's a good 70k. Factor in agent fees, you'd have to at least sell him at 78k to break even. And that is not factoring in trainer salary and bidding price. Let's say you get a superior trainer and a superior youth trainer (will probably just get him for 1k so it's negligible). There's a 20k salary superior trainer going for 200k+ right now. So the trainer itself will cost you 480k, while the youth trainer just around 170k (I looked around, you can get a 12k salary superior youth trainer for 1k). So that makes it 650k. If you train dual position training, each player should earn and extra 100k to make up for the trainer (I spread the cost across 6 players), meaning to break even, you'll need to sell Boucher for at least 170k. If you actually manage to sell him for 200k, congrats, you earned 30k in 14 weeks. Which is very much less than the amount you'd get in one game if you invested that money into your arena.
...one of them maxes at Level 1 but lets you buy 3 levels? That's not great.
Merchandise store gives you an increase in merchandise sales at every level (it gives off a fixed amount of money). The problem is that the increase in weekly upkeep increases by the same amount, essentially making you earn as much as you would earn if it was level 1. Although I've heard people saying that having level 3 will help with overextension tax, but you won't need to worry about that unless you're competing.