Messi is going to continue to be the best, says Pogba

The elite of world football will gather in Paris on Monday for the Ballon d'Or ceremony, with Real Madrid forward Vinicius Junior the leading candidate for the men's award and Barcelona's Aitana Bonmati the hot favourite to win her second-successive crown.

The men's shortlist for the 2023/24 edition of the prestigious individual award is the first since 2003 to feature neither Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo who hoovered up the prize 13 times between them.

Vinicius, the man who inherited Ronaldo's number seven shirt at Real Madrid, has been tipped by many pundits to succeed Messi as the Men's Ballon d'Or after a season in which he won the Spanish championship and Champions League.

"Vinicius is going to win (the Ballon d'Or)," Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti declared after his player netted a hat-trick in a 5-2 Champions League win against Borussia Dortmund last week.

"And not because of the three goals but because of his character. He's extraordinary."

If the 24-year-old Brazilian showed why he is expected to take Messi's crown in Madrid's stunning comeback midweek, he was less influential in Saturday's La Liga Clasico as Real were comprehensively beaten 4-0 by Barcelona.

But Vinicius' six goals last term were vital as Madrid lifted their 15th Champions League, with the attacker scoring a brace in the semi-final and a goal in the final.

Vinicius has also become a figurehead in the fight against racism after being targeted on numerous occasions since arriving in Spain in 2018.

He earned worldwide support in May 2023 when he squared off with Valencia supporters after suffering abuse at their Mestalla Stadium.

The players expected to challenge Vinicius for the Ballon d'Or are club-mate and England star Jude Bellingham, as well as Manchester City and Spain's Euro 2024-winning midfield general Rodri.

Also among the list of nominees are goal machines Erling Haaland, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe.

Real Madrid right-back Dani Carvajal has an outside shot, after a season which saw him lift the treble of La Liga, Champions League and European Championship.

In the Women's Ballon d'Or, 26-year-old Barcelona and Spain playmaker Bonmati is expected to retain the title she claimed for the first time last season.

She was again the outstanding player in a team which won its first continental quadruple of domestic league and cup, Spanish Supercopa and Champions League.

Barcelona's dominance of the women's game is reflected in the number of nominees the Catalan club boasts, with attackers Caroline Graham Hansen and Salma Paralluelo considered the two principal threats to their club-mate Bonmati.

The Ballon d'Or ceremony will take place in the centre of Paris on Monday where the winners, as decided by an international jury of football journalists, will be announced.

The World Cup final between France and Croatia on Sunday was briefly interrupted when three intruders affiliated to anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot ran onto the pitch before being hauled off by stewards.

The pitch invaders, who were dressed in police-style outfits, were later detained by police, one of them told Reuters by telephone from a police station near Moscow's Luzhniki stadium, venue for the match.

In a post on its Facebook page, the group said its action was intended to draw attention to what it said were human rights abuses in Russia.

Three of Pussy Riot's original members were jailed in 2012 for staging a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin in a church and the group have since become a symbol of anti-Kremlin direct action.

In the second half of Sunday's match, the three people wearing white shirts with police-style epaulettes, black trousers and police hats ran out onto the pitch from the area behind the French goal. A fourth person tried to run onto the pitch but was tackled on the sidelines.

The three ran about 50 metres, dispersing in different directions, before stewards wearing high-visibility jackets tackled them to the ground and dragged them off the pitch.

One photograph on social media showed one of the pitch invaders, a woman with blonde hair tucked under a police cap, performing a high-five with France player Kylian Mbappe before being caught.

The match, watched from the stands by Putin and the French and Croatian presidents, was halted, but resumed about 25 seconds later. A witness at the stadium said he had seen police escorting the pitch invaders out of the stadium grounds.

The pitch invasion was the first significant security lapse in the five-week tournament that has won hosts Russia widespread praise for their good organisation and efficiency.

Pussy Riot member Olga Kurachyova told Reuters she was one of the pitch invaders and was being held at Luzhniki police station. She said she could not speak further because police were trying to take her mobile phone away from her.

Moscow police said in a statement that three young women and a young man had been detained after running onto the pitch.

LIST OF DEMANDS

In its Facebook post, Pussy Riot complained of rights abuses in Russia. They alluded to Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker jailed for 20 years in 2015 for setting fire to two offices in Crimea, including one belonging to Russia's ruling party, after Moscow annexed the region from Ukraine.

Pussy Riot said their demands included freeing political prisoners in Russia, freedom of speech on the internet, freedom to protest, and allowing political competition.

The group shared a video on social media recorded before the incident featuring three female activists, at least two of whom were among those detained. They wore police uniforms and one of them wore a pink balaclava.

"The World Cup has shown wonderfully what the police can be like in Russia, but what will happen afterwards?" one of the activists asked in the video, an apparent allusion to lenient policing noted by Russians during the tournament.

A separate video posted on social media appeared to show the moments after the pitch invaders had been detained.

Two of them, a man and a woman, could be seen standing in a room, dressed in dishevelled police uniforms, while a voice off camera demanded handcuffs be brought.

"Do you know that Russia will pay for this to FIFA through sanctions?" the off-camera voice said, in an angry tone. "You wanted to shit on Russia, didn’t you?"

"We are for Russia," the male detainee replied.

"Sometimes I regret that it's not 1937," the person off- camera in the video said. That year was the height of political repressions carried out by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Photographs of the pitch invasion suggested the pitch invaders did not include the three Pussy Riot members who were jailed in 2012 for performing in the church.

Russian news website MediaZona, co-founded by one of the original three Pussy Riot members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, reported that one of the pitch invaders was Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova's husband.

Nobody would have hand-picked the tournament's two worst teams to launch the 2018 World Cup, but when Russia and Saudi Arabia meet on Thursday form will be irrelevant as the world's biggest sporting festival explodes into life in Moscow.

Hosts Russia, and Saudi Arabia are the two lowest-ranked teams at the tournament by some distance and they are both in dire form. But their clash will set the tone for the global showpiece.

Partly due to a lack of competitive matches, Russia have slipped to 70th in the FIFA rankings, which sounds shockingly low for a World Cup team until you glance up to see the Saudis, despite securing automatic qualification from a competitive Asian confederation, at 67.

Despite failing to win in seven matches stretching back to October, 2017, the hosts still have realistic hopes of making it to the second round for the first time in more than 30 years after being drawn in a group also containing Egypt and Uruguay.

Russia coach Stanislav Cherchesov has been working overtime trying to rebuild his team, particularly defensively, after a cruel run of serious injuries to some of his most experienced operators, but the tournament has arrived without him showing much evidence of progress.

His team last tasted success via a 4-2 victory over South Korea - and even that win needed two own goals - and their most recent warm-ups brought defeat by Austria and a 1-1 draw with Turkey.

In those games, Russia's laboured build-up play and careless passing looked light-years away from the irresistible, quicksilver side that lit up the European championship a decade ago.

That 2008 tournament, in which they reached the semifinals, is something of an island of success for a nation who failed to qualify for the World Cups either side of it and made no impression in 2014 when they finished behind Belgium and Algeria.

That historical and recent lack of form means that few in Russia are holding out much hope of glory on home soil but the players will almost certainly be lifted by the occasion and by finally getting their teeth into a competitive match.

They also have a puncher's chance in the shape of striker Fyodor Smolov, who has become a scoring machine since being left out of the squad in 2014 with more than 60 goals over the last three seasons for his club Krasnodar.

If they are going to do it against anyone then it should be against a Saudi team coming off the back of successive friendly losses to Italy, Peru and Germany, though they showed patches of encouraging form and did beat Algeria and Greece in May.

Updates

Fedor Smolov will line up as a lone striker for Russia as the World Cup hosts attempt to end a seven-match winless run in the opening game of the tournament against Saudi Arabia in Moscow on Thursday.

The Krasnodar forward will be supported by Aleksandr Golovin and Alexander Samedov out wide as Russia bid to win a World Cup game for the first time since 2002.

Saudi Arabia return to the tournament after a 12-year absence and are the second-lowest ranked side in the competition at 67th in the world, three places above Russia.

Saudi coach Juan Antonio Pizzi will hope Mohammed Al-Sahlawi, who bagged a staggering 16 goals in qualifying, can snap a nine-game scoring drought in Russia.

Starting line-ups for the opening match of the World Cup between hosts Russia and Saudi Arabia in Group A in Moscow on Thursday (1500 GMT kick-off):

Russia (4-2-3-1)

Igor Akinfeev (capt); Mario Fernandes, Ilya Kupetov, Sergey Ignashevich, Yury Zhirkov; Iury Gazinsky, Roman Zobnin; Alan Dzagoev, Aleksandr Golovin, Alexander Samedov; Fedor Smolov

Coach: Stanislav Cherchesov (RUS)

Saudi Arabia (4-5-1)

Abdullah Al-Muaiouf; Osama Hawsawi (capt), Omar Hawsawi, Mohammed Al-Burayk, Yasser Al-Shahrani; Salman Al-Faraj, Yahia Al-Shehri, Abdullah Otayf, Taiseer Al-Jassam, Salem Al-Dawsari; Mohammed Al-Sahlawi

Coach: Juan Antonio Pizzi (ESP)

Referee: Nestor Pitana (ARG)

Over the next month, Russia will serve up a football stroganoff spiced with enthralling matches, a dash of the world's finest players and the biggest prize in the sporting world -- the FIFA World Cup.

The biggest show in the world will kick off today and fans will dig into a buffet of perfectly-timed tackles, exquisite passes, nerve-wracking penalty shootouts and goals that will give birth to legends.

Unfortunately, only one nation will lift the prize while players from 31 other countries will be left to swallow the bitter pill of defeat.

The world is ready for the football feast to begin with state-of-the-art stadia and the World Cup will provide a window into the planet's largest country -- from the chilly climate at the Spartak Stadium in Moscow and the Fisht Stadium on the Russian Riviera in Sochi to the Saint Petersburg Stadium in the 'Window on the West'. Fans must traverse a continent to reach the Ekaterinburg Stadium in Asia and they must cross borders to reach the Kaliningrad Stadium in a Russian enclave separate from the rest of the country and squeezed snugly between Lithuania and Poland.

The event will also provide a welcome boost to the economic situation in the land of Tsars by reinvigorating stagnating sectors of the economy with an influx of foreign visitors and their spending. Although the analysts at Moody's believe the impact will be minimal, others opine that the improvements to infrastructure and investment in tourism could increase the economy's growth potential.

However, although Russia is eager to welcome some of the world's biggest names, there are burning questions in the back of every fan's mind.

Will football pay its dues to Lionel Messi and reward him with the trophy or will Cristiano Ronaldo pull off the miracle of all miracles and lift the cup with his unfavoured Portuguese side? Will it be Neymar who leads his Brazil to glory after their embarrassing exit in 2014 or will it be the star-studded French? Will the Germans retain? Will Spain, with a new head coach a day before the World Cup, be the big team to bite the dust early? Which unfancied underdog will make a deep run?

These issues and many more will be playing on the minds of supporters, but unfortunately there is no Paul the Octopus to provide us with spoilers. The answers will come with time and the ultimate question will be answered at the Luzhniki Stadium on July 15. All we can do till then is sit back and enjoy the ride.

Inter Miami remained on track for the record points tally in Major League Soccer history after Leonardo Campana's stoppage-time goal gave them a 1-0 win at Toronto.

Miami started with all their big-name stars, including Lionel Messi, on the bench but the Argentine was introduced in the 61st minute to the delight of many in the Toronto crowd.

The Florida side had already secured the Supporters' Shield, for the top team in the regular season, with their midweek win at the Columbus Crew.

With top seed and home field advantage secured for the playoffs, the only target left for Miami is to try to better the record of 73 points in a season set by the New England Revolution in 2021.

The win leaves Miami on 71 points ahead of the final game of the season -- at home to New England on October 19.

An uneventful game, on a less than perfect field, was settled in added time when Luis Suarez, also on as a substitute, pumped a cross into the box and Ecuador international Campana took the ball on his thigh before volleying home on the turn.

It was only the second shot on target of the game for Miami and midfielder Julian Gressel said they were now gunning for the record.

"I think we'd all be lying if we said it doesn't matter. Now we have something to play for in front of our home fans it would be a nice way to finish off with that record-setting season," he said.

It was Toronto's final game of the campaign and their slim hopes of making the post-season ended a few hours later when when D.C. United enjoyed a 2-1 win at the New England Revolution.

A left-foot blast from Pedro Santos gave D.C. a third minute lead in five minutes later MLS's leading scorer Christian Benteke took advantage of chaos in the New England defence to make it 2-0.

The Revolution back line failed to deal with a simple long ball down the middle and Belgian striker Benteke headed past the advancing keeper Aljaz Ivacic for his 23rd goal of the season.

An own goal from Finnish defender Matti Pelotola, who headed a cross from Ian Harkes into his own net, provided some late nerves but D.C. held on for three points which leave them in 8th place, in a wildcard spot, level on 40 points with Montreal and three ahead of Philadelphia going into the final round of games on October 19.

Philadelphia fell to a 3-2 loss at defending champions Columbus, who have secured second spot in the East behind Miami.

Colombian striker Cucho Hernandez scored twice for the Crew to leave the Union with only the slimmest of hopes of reaching the playoffs.

Twelth-placed Atlanta United also have a mathematical chance of post-season action after beating the New York Red Bulls, who have qualified, 2-1.

Eight of the nine playoff spots in the Western Conference have been secured with the only remaining issue whether Austin or Portland will take the last wildcard slot.

Austin were playing at LA Galaxy later on Saturday with Portland at home to Dallas on Sunday.