Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein of Jordan will challenge incumbent Sepp Blatter for FIFA presidency.
The 39-year-old FIFA vice-president will stand as a candidate at the presidential election on May 29, where Sepp Blatter, 78, will seek a fifth term of office.
Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein said: “It is time to shift the focus away from administrative controversy and back to sport.
“The headlines should be about football, not about FIFA.” 
Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein became president of Jordanian football in 1999 before being elected as the Asian Football Confederation’s FIFA vice-president in 2011. He has successfully championed the lifting of FIFA’s ban on the hijab in women’s football and was also one of a number of officials who called for the publication of Michael Garcia’s report into allegations of corruption surrounding the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids.
Prince Ali said he had been encouraged to stand by colleagues.
UEFA president Michel Platini is said to be “pleased” that Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein has decided to enter the race and will attempt to get the Jordanian as many votes as possible in Europe.
Russia has revealed that its preliminary budget for holding the 2018 World Cup is almost twice what it projected when it won the bid in 2010.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko announced a budget of 600 billion roubles ($19 billion), nearly 40% of which will go into building or renovating stadiums.
The rest of the money will be spent on transport and hotel infrastructure.
Russia beat off rival bids from England and other EU states to host the world’s highest-profile single sports event.
Vitaly Mutko said the costs were expected to be split evenly between the public and private sectors.
Eleven host cities have been chosen which span the European part of Russia: Moscow (with two of the 12 stadiums), St Petersburg, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Kaliningrad, Volgograd and Saransk.
Speaking at the same news conference in Moscow, FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke said that, based on the Russian bid, the quality of the stadiums would be “amazing”.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter, for his part, said football was expanding all the time.
“[Can] you imagine that actually we had a representative of Syria in the FIFA committees last week and they play football in Syria?” he said in Moscow, speaking as fighting raged in Aleppo and other Syrian cities.
“Perhaps not now in Aleppo, but they play football in Syria,” he said.
“Do you know that in Afghanistan they have a league playing football? Everywhere football is played. Football gives people the hope and football connects these people.”
Sepp Blatter stressed again that it was the first time the World Cup was coming “to the eastern part of Europe”.
Russia won the 2018 bid over the UK and two joint bids by Portugal and Spain, and Belgium and the Netherlands.
