My advice would be to go straight for the gold players. don't bother building a full silver team because you'll end up spending too much, if you have enough money for a gold player get him, usually you can get 75 or so rated players for around 500-700 coins, but beware not to always spend all your coins because you need a reserve for contracts/fitness cards.
Also try to keep your chemistry up, the higher you chemistry the better your team performs, players from the same league/of same nationality give the best chemistry so it's best to build a team of a certain league e.t BPL team, La Liga team or a team with all the players of the same nationality e.t Brazilian team, English team and so on.
It can be confusing at first but once you understand it, you can't stop playing it, I didn't play FUT before FIFA 13 because I also thought it all seems too complicated, but now I barely play other features of fifa, ofcourse kick-off and a bit of career mode here or there.