The small group of people who have seen a secret FIFA report on corruption in the World Cup bidding process will soon grow by at least one. And possibly by even more.

That was the most intriguing result of meetings this week in Zurich, where Michael J. Garcia, the head investigator of FIFA’s independent ethics committee, and Hans-Joachim Eckert, the committee’s top judge, reached an agreement that calls for Garcia’s report to be reviewed by a third, independent official. That official, Domenico Scala, who leads FIFA’s audit and compliance committee in addition to working as an executive at a Swiss biotechnology company, will then determine if some part — or even all — of Garcia’s report will be made available to the 28 members of FIFA’s executive committee.

“Both chairmen agreed that it is of major importance that the FIFA executive committee has the information necessary to evaluate which steps are required based on the work done by the FIFA ethics committee,” Garcia and Eckert said in a statement released by FIFA. They said that they would answer any questions Scala had on the information in the report and that FIFA’s decision this week to file a criminal complaint over the matter with the Swiss authorities would not delay the review or any open cases in the ethics committee.

For those in the soccer community who have lobbied for more transparency, the compromise is a step — albeit a small one — toward making public everything that Garcia uncovered in his investigation into the process by which Russia won the bid to host the World Cup in 2018 and Qatar won the bid for 2022. Garcia and Eckert had been at odds over the publication of the report; Garcia has called for it to be made public (with appropriate redactions), while Eckert has maintained that privacy concerns make the report’s release “impossible.”