I didn't spend diamonds, and didn't finish in Amateur on any of my 5 worlds. I have a L10 on all 5.
I don't find your whining amusing, and yet here we are.
You didn't *need* to spend diamonds on live
because the event was massively overhauled from the initial beta version!
These changes included:
1. the daily 'free' footballs & all quest reward footballs were iirc, only 100.
This was upped to 120 after multiple beta players proved the math so out of touch!
2. an upgrade was added to the Silver league? Also, the Bronze league was changed from top 20% to top 25%.
(I *might* be recalling the silver league wrong? but, bronze league was altered as even with the extra footballs from 'fix #1', the vast majority of players were going to end up at least 1 upgrade short... the change was entirely moot on beta however,
because literally EVERYONE was spending diamonds in a race to just get the final required upgrade from Bronze league!)
Also, iirc, everyone at this point received
an additional 1000 free diamonds to boot!
And yet, it *still* resulted in nothing changing, as everyone was spending those same diamonds. (hence, it had only a 5% impact vs. actually allowing a properly achievable result of gaining a Lv10 prize for finishing the whole event because you still needed 11 total touchdowns to ensure you hit Lv10!)
3. after yet again proving that 75% of the player base would miss out on a Lv10 prize, an upgrade was added to Amateur league *after* the event ended! >.<
4. due to the 'stealth boost' to amateur league, a week or so later? everyone was given another upgrade or two because the event had been so badly gakked up from the beginning!
Because 'fix #3' (upgraded added to amateur league) was never announced during the run of the event, many players gave up as they could see they would still *need* to spend at least 1-2k more diamonds out of pocket to get a Lv10 through just the Touchdown rewards...
Better communication (and some actual basic Kindergarten level math skills) by the Inno devs, would have prevented the full clusterfeth that befell beta.
WE here on live however never had to put up with any of this BS.
On the live version, all the necessary changes had been made to ensure that Lv10 was 100% achievable just by fully finishing the entire quest line & playing the mini-game with a bare semblance of remote intelligence. (ie: you would only be ganked if you chose only Gold players like 90-100% of the time!)
But on beta it was
during the whole run of the event itself impossible to gain Lv10 without at least spending a whole bunch of diamonds.
(ie: more than the 2k 'free' dias they ended up getting!)