Leicester City are famously known as the 5,000-1 winners of the Premier League title but it is not yet clear how badly bookies are on the line for those payouts.

There were surely very few bettors who put money on Leicester to win the title at 5,000-1 but the biggest liabilities came when their odds improved to 100-1 to 500-1.

“I don’t think the clever punters will have backed Leicester,” Simon Clare, Coral’s PR director, said on Tuesday. “They were like the bookies, thinking ‘it won’t last’ in mid-September, but that is where the damage was done.

“The total ante-post stakes on the Premier League are actually quite small. Our total was £1 million across both retail and online, which pales into insignificance against what we take on Saturdays on the three o’clock kick-offs. But no bookie can ever have seen losses like this on the singles market on one league, because you would never take the stakes, or lay prices like this. We’ve done £2 million, so across the industry, it’s possibly £20 million.”

The "big" clubs of England struggled badly this season with Tottenham Hotspur starting the season at 150-1 and West Ham were at 3,000-1.

“It’s a falsehood if any bookie says they have lost money overall on Leicester,” Donohue said on Twitter. “£3 million is a record net payout for a title winner, but we did well out of Leicester upsetting the odds to get there. No complaints at all.”