They are football’s most famous five digits since Maradona’s Hand of God, those 5,000-1 odds Leicester City were to win the title at the start of the most unlikely Premiers League season of all and which have left bookmakers supposedly sobbing over a massive payout.

The five digits have become central to the miraculous Leicester narrative, a short-cut in the explanation of just how unlikely their success is, and a short-cut eagerly embraced by media everywhere.

Given that gambling is so ubiquitous that odds are even available on the likely size of Donald Trump’s todger it can be little surprise that the most remarkable football story in decades gets to be so represented, especially when it appeals so readily to punter instincts.

Only those living in a cave can have escaped the torrent of publicity pumped out by bookmaker corporations, full of the usual stuff about punters “piling in” to Leicester, leaving bookies “floored” by the “incredible windfalls” being “forked out” on the back of “the worst day in bookmaker history”.

All of it comes in gift-wrapped ready-to-go releases, usually accompanied by pictures of ‘lucky punters’ grasping blown-up cheques, bottles of champagnes and suspiciously smooth sound-bites about how they can’t believe it happened to an ordinary bloke like me – unbelievable, Gary.

The only problem is that it’s top-of-the-league crappola; far from Leicester’s victory being a ‘skinner’ it has in fact been a rare gift from the corporate Gods.

First of all, from a bookmaking point of view, only those armed with ‘morkoting’ degrees and/or necks made of crocodile hide can present a 5,000-1 outsider as some disastrous result.

Mug punting

At those odds, we’re talking fiver and tenner stakes, the sort of mug punting corporations hoover up. Hindsight is wonderful but anyone seriously betting on Leicester to win the league last September was probably killing a little time before their meds review.

In contrast, a lot of very serious gambling indeed was occurring on Leicester’s competition, the dividend on which isn’t fed to news organisations with nearly the same enthusiasm, perhaps because stark profit and loss sheets might have lowered the happy-clappy tone.

Now, almost every business chooses to project itself in flattering terms, just as it does everything to maximise its profitability.

But when it comes to the much of the gambling industry’s presentation of Leicester’s success, there has been a yawning chasm between the current spin and reality.

The reality is that even the highest reaches of those suspiciously vague industry estimates about the cost of Leicester winning are still peanuts in PR terms.

Bookmakers spend fortunes on encouraging new accounts – to the extent that the drive for new customers at the Cheltenham festival resulted in pricing and offers that Ladbrokes described as an abandonment of "bookmaking principles" – but you couldn't write a better story than Leicester's in terms of luring gambling virgins to the volcano's lip.

The bottom line is that no bookmaker lost money overall on Leicester winning the Premier League.

That the narrative being pumped out by them, one eagerly picked up by media of all shades of credibility, is presented in a diametrically opposite way can hardly be a shock considering the bookie chains are constantly on the make and their hustle makes for easy copy.

And considering what else is gets passed off as news in this information age, a stream of PR stodge padding out cartoon representations about bookies and punters hardly qualifies as a crime against humanity.

But even this relatively harmless exercise still surely says something about how news of all sorts gets presented, an environment often portrayed as some crisis of information but which is really a crisis of editing.

If they ponder the concept at all, many people tend to instinctively distrust editing, equating it with censorship or an elitism which is counter to the central digital premise that everything gets put out there as quickly as possible and in the process removing suspicion about what gets left out.

Except contrary to the dystopian nightmare, what is becoming increasingly obvious is that what doesn’t get left out anymore is mostly a remorseless tide of attention-seeking from that vast mass of humanity convinced of its own fascinating individual complication.

Face value

Which is harmless enough too in its own terms, except that attention seeking instinct has been hijacked by big business to present a relentless 24/7 hard-sell that can make the gap between reality and spin so blurry as to become irrelevant.

It’s a hard-sell happily gobbled up by all hard-pressed media sectors where puff such as the stuff about the supposed cost of Leicester’s success to a bookmaking industry get gobbled up before being spewed out again at face value.

The fact it’s mostly rubbish can seem superfluous given the demand for material which can be churned out quickly and, most importantly of all, cheaply.

But that it can then get presented as fact illustrates how important what gets left out can actually be.

This bookmaker stuff about Leicester is a three-card PR trick, yet another illustration of how blizzards of facts are not the same thing as the truth, a relatively unimportant distinction it seems, and which ignoring facilitates the hard-sell even more.

Gambling industry

There is already speculation in gambling industry circles that the days of 5,000-1 odds are over, given how lop-sided such a price is in a 20-runner field.

However it must be long odds-on next August that similarly big prices about Burnley for instance coming out on top will be readily available, replete with the usual PR bumph about how bookies are facing a hiding through their outrageous generosity.

And while those same bookies will keep their fingers crossed for another ‘morkoting’ miracle, the memory of how in the past people were once employed to bin this stuff rather than recycle it will recede even further.