The United States, Mexico and Canada have submitted a joint bid to host the 2026 World Cup and will face competition from Morocco to stage the tournament.
That competition will be the first to include 48 teams, rather than the 32 who will compete in Russia next year and in Qatar in 2022.
The next stage of the process is the submission of candidacy dossiers on March 16 next year, before the final decision is made by FIFA on June 13.
The decision used to be made by FIFA's executive committee, but following some suspicions over its selection of Russia and Qatar in December 2010, and the subsequent scandal that saw Sepp Blatter lose the presidency, the committee was stripped of some power and renamed the FIFA Council.
The new-look body must rubber-stamp the bids, but the final decision will be taken in a vote of the 211 national federations at a congress in Moscow.
