On Saturday Argentina face Russia in a friendly at the Luzhniki Stadium, a venue the team now hope to revisit in eight months’ time for the World Cup final.

Having qualified for next summer’s tournament, courtesy of Lionel Messi’s hat-trick against Ecuador in October, Jorge Sampaoli’s team are finally in Russia, a place many doubted they would make it to a little over a year ago. It is difficult to overstate the seriousness of the trouble that was threatening the very existence of one of the most famous national teams.

A tearful Messi had proclaimed his retirement from international football, while back in Argentina the country’s football association, the AFA, had its offices raided. Elections for the AFA presidency were annulled when the vote count did not correspond to the size of the electorate (it ended 38-38 from 75 members), Fifa intervened and a nominated committee took over the association. Auditors found massive debts; and fiscal anomalies threatened to culminate with several clubs in court.

In addition the TV deal for domestic football was in turmoil as the new-ish government aimed to disentangle itself from an inherited populist football package whereby TV broadcasts were state-funded. Perhaps the most damning legacy of the mess was that the country’s once excellent youth squads had sunk into oblivion, failing to qualify at all for competitions they used to dominate.

Things were really bad. One official involved at the time said, “We stepped in and found only shit; not a single rose.” Rumours that the AFA was struggling to pay some of its employees abounded and there were reports that scraping together the €1m needed to pay Sampaoli’s release clause from Sevilla was proving a challenge.

That was then. Now a hopeful squad are training in Moscow in a transformed environment. A revived contract with Adidas is backing this friendly and the new national strip was unveiled this week as if to illustrate further a new beginning – an attempt at the “clean slate” approach, or, as they say in Argentina, borrón y cuenta nueva – an expression that dates back to medieval account-keeping, when a smudge on the ink meant starting over.

A new beginning has been long overdue. It is a pretty tall order to transform radically the sordid modus operandi that has been in existence since the 1970s under the strong leadership of Don Julio Grondona. His death in 2014 left a void at the top of the power pyramid which, combined with the subsequent Fifa scandal and the government’s withdrawal from financing the TV rights, left the stage wide open as never before.

While the national government conducted negotiations with several broadcasters with a view to devolve football to the private realm a new Super League was taking shape. Headed by a CEO who currently works with the AFA leaders, this posse of the top clubs may in due course operate somewhat independently of the AFA, similar to the relationship between the Premier League and the Football Association in England.

'We are all getting paid, AFA is paying all the wages' one insider says. 'In Argentina, that in itself is a novelty'

Last weekend the Superclásico between Boca Juniors and River Plate, the eighth fixture of the new Superliga, was available on pay-per-view only, representing a not insignificant income for the AFA, for the time being still the main institution overseeing football in the country. Add to this Fifa’s financial reward for participating nations following qualification for the 2018 World Cup, a rebooted sponsorship and marketing package domestically, plus the renewed contract with Adidas, and the once meagre coffers look as if they are filling up.

That, in itself, does not mean that all troubles are over. The old AFA enjoyed financial returns by the millions; the problems were in internal book-keeping, the distribution of that income among clubs and the general obscure processes that are de rigueur within the football establishment.

It is perhaps too early to say all that has changed. But clearly, as world football has come under more scrutiny and corruption generally is a topic in the spotlight, Argentina’s football has – by the skin of its teeth – avoided oblivion and secured not only its place in Russia but its very existence back home.

Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero in training before Argentina’s friendly in Russia. Photograph: Sergei Savostyanov/TASS

The transformation has been slow and the jury is still out as to whether “new” in this case will mean better but there is a widespread feeling that the tide is turning. Everyone is talking about the new AFA. “We are all getting paid, AFA is paying all the wages,” one insider says from Moscow. “In Argentina that in itself is a novelty.”

There are detractors, opponents and those who do not believe that cleaning the house is even possible, especially domestically where several years of free TV football for all was a much loved proposition and where the political stakes and power games at play are regarded with a critical eye by many who are partisan anyway, one way or another.

“But that is just to be expected from a populace who reveres Maradona and questions Messi,” says one Argentinian businessman who is positive about the changes. Others are more cynical about the whole concept of transparency, believing this to be just part and parcel of a neoliberal rhetoric that will see the rich clubs get richer and the poor ones poorer. “Obscene transparency,” as one observer puts it.

But in the international arena Sampaoli and his players prepare to keep the nation hopeful until at least next summer. And part of the overall project, apart from winning the World Cup, is a return to thinking ahead and projecting a future for generations to come.

The management of the youth teams has been restructured, with Juan Sebastian Verón in charge, and the traditional “sparrings” – young players travelling with the first team for training purposes – have been reintroduced, this time with a layered scheme under which the manager of the under-20s works with the manager of the under-17s who in turn assists the under-15s manager, Pablo Aimar.

Instead of the sparrings playing against the first team, for example, Sampaoli has introduced a mixed set of training sessions, where under-20s and first team train together. His assistant, Sebastián Beccacece, is also the under-20s trainer, and the idea is to work in as integrated a manner as possible. Players born in 1999, 2000 and 2001 are the focus right now and they are in Russia training with the first team, with a view to becoming the next generation of superlative talents that the nation has grown accustomed to exporting and relishing in equal measure.

Sampaoli, who describes himself as “a broker of emotions”, is an interesting testament to the power of unexpected achievement; a left-field character who does not easily fit into pre-existing moulds, whose football ideology is almost political in its convictions, shaped by imbibing much of the same tonic as César Luis Menotti and Marcelo Bielsa, but accompanied with a flexibility the latter lacks.

In the long run Argentina may be back on track. In the mid-term Russia 2018 is the name of the game.