This year's football World Cup Final will take place exactly one week before Christmas Day, on Sunday 18 December.
Yes, in an unprecedented move, the month-long tournament – the biggest event in world sport, which takes place every four years and has previously always been held during the summer – is getting underway in a few weeks' time, on 20 November, and will dominate the TV schedules on both BBC and ITV in the build-up to the traditional Christmas TV period.
So, why is this happening, and how will it affect our precious festive telly?
Well, it all goes back to the hugely controversial decision by FIFA to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a tiny country in the Middle East. It's searingly hot there in the summer months, to the extent that it would be unsafe for the footballers to play for 90 minutes, so FIFA then decided to push back the whole competition to the winter.
And it's not just the timing that's used a backlash, given the appalling human rights record of Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal and women face deep discrimination.
As for the impact that staging the World Cup in the winter is going to have, it's already affecting the TV schedules. Take the new series of ITV's annual ratings blockbuster I'm A Celeb, for example. The flagship show, hosted by Ant and Dec, usually runs for three weeks from late November through to early December. But this year, the series will begin earlier, in the first week of November, so ITV can get most of it out of the way before the World Cup kicks off in earnest in late November.
The matches will take place at 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 7pm UK time, which means ITV can still air big shows in the post-9pm slot, but it's clearly going to mess with the prime-time schedules.
With 32 teams in the World Cup – including England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland sadly failed to qualify) – there will be four games a day in the first qualifying round, meaning the TV schedules on the two biggest changes, BBC One and ITV, will be dominated by football like never before, when we should be getting our festive fix.
And adding to the complications for the TV schedulers is the fact that which channel airs which games after that first stage in the competition cannot be decided until they know which teams have qualified for the latter stages. There will be loads of festive TV specials this year – from David Walliams' Gangsta Granny Strikes Again on BBC One to Get Britain Singing on ITV – but they will inevitably end up squeezed into a shorter time-span.
On the plus side, the end of the year is going to be full of massive live TV events. Jut imagine if England or Wales get to the World Cup Final on 18 December, with the Strictly final taking place the day before. It would make for one of the most unusual and exciting festive seasons ever.
When does I'm A Celeb 2022 start?
It's been reported that I'm A Celeb will return to our screens on Sunday 6 November - although it hasn't been confirmed by ITV yet.