Dramatic changes to Africa's top competition now await rubber-stamping by the Confederation of African Football's (Caf) executive committee after radical recommendations made at a symposium in Morocco on Wednesday.

The showpiece Africa Cup of Nations finals is to be expanded and its contentious timing changed, but its frequency will remain every two years.

The two annual club competitions - the African Champions League and African Confederation Cup - will now run from August to May rather than inside a calendar year, as has been done for decades.

Changes to refereeing structures, coaching standards and medical preparedness were also recommended.

Caf's executive committee meet in Rabat on Thursday and are expected to formalise all the major recommendations.

The dogged insistence in the past to keep the Nations Cup in January, much to the chagrin of clubs in Europe forced to give up their African players at a crucial time in their respective domestic campaigns, is now at an end. The tournament is to be moved to June and July and will have 24 teams.

But it will stay every two years as the tournament is the source of revenue for Caf, who would lose half of that money were the finals played every four years.

There was no opposition to the change of the timing of the finals which will come as music to the ears of African players based at European clubs, who have had to walk a difficult gauntlet of loyalty between their clubs, angry at losing them for a month in the middle of their season, and playing for their country in an elite tournament.

The change means there will no longer be any conflict.

The increase in the number of finalists is a bid to increased marketing and TV revenue, talking a leaf out of the book of Uefa who did the same with last year's European Championship.

Hosting requirements must be increased to top standards, the symposium also recommended, particularly around the issue of pitches and hotel, whose poor quality had drawn heavy criticism at recent finals tournaments.

This year's expansion of the number of clubs in the Champions League and Confederation Cup has meant the top teams in Africa have been forced to play group matches between May and July when usually they would be enjoying end-of-season holidays and then preparing for the new campaign.

The criticism of the dates had led to the recommendation that, possibly as early as next year, the Champions League and Confederation Cup will run from August to May with preliminary rounds played at the start and the group phase finished by the end of year to allow the more knockout quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals to be completed by May.

It will mean clubs who finished their domestic campaigns in May no longer have to postpone their off-season and poor-season to play in the group phase.