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A year ago the Argentinian FA was on its knees and Lionel Messi wanted to quit international SBOBET football. On Saturday they play Russia in Moscow with fresh hope 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.That was then. SBOBET 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. 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.SBOBET