Tuesday 10 May 2016 21:22, UK
The 2026 World Cup hosts will be decided in May 2020, three years later than originally scheduled because of the corruption scandals that have engulfed FIFA.
In an attempt to avoid the recriminations that dogged the 2010 decision to give the 2018 World Cup to Russia and 2022 tournament to Qatar, world football's governing body will try a four-phase approach for 2026.
This will effectively be a year of consultation and then three years of "bid preparation" and evaluation, but a decision on whether to leave the tournament at 32 teams will be made in October 2016.
The bidding process was the headline announcement from the first two-day meeting of the new FIFA Council - the successor body to the ExCo - in Mexico City.
The consultation phase of the process will run until May 2017 and will look at four main areas: human rights and environmental protection, the ability to exclude bids that do not meet technical requirements, a review of stance on joint bids and whether to increase the World Cup to 40 teams.
A decision on the latter, however, is expected by this October, with Europe's leading clubs already making their displeasure at the idea of expansion clear.
Also settled in October will be which confederations can put bids forward, with the current rules only excluding the Asian Football Confederation because Qatar will have hosted the previous World Cup.
With bids likely to come from CONCACAF nations Canada, Mexico and the US - perhaps in a combination of two or even three of those nations - as well as interest from Australia and New Zealand, Turkey and Kazakhstan, Morocco and perhaps even England, FIFA will not be short of suitors.
But new FIFA president Gianni Infantino knows the organisation cannot afford another decade of the kind of scrutiny that the decision to go to Qatar has brought.
Last month, Harvard human rights expert Professor John Ruggie wrote a damning report for FIFA about its failure to make human rights a priority in its decision-making or exert more pressure for change on hosts.
Qatar's slow progress in reforming how it treats and uses migrant workers has reflected very poorly on FIFA.
