Leicester City manager Nigel Pearson has claimed that it will be crucial for the club to sign more players to longer-term deals this season.

The Championship winners were forced to let a number of players wait until long after promotion was secured to table new contracts, but Pearson believes that the plan to tie down key members of the squad will now be easier to execute.

"It is well documented last season in terms of how many players were potentially going to be out of contract at the end of the season," the Foxes manager is quoted as saying by The Mirror. "For various reasons, financial reasons being very important in there, we didn't renegotiate a lot of the contracts until the end of the season.

"So we have done quite a bit of business in terms of securing the services of players who played a big part last year, and also renegotiating with some of our younger players who we feel we need to make sure we extend their contracts."

Jamie Vardy put pen to paper on a four-year contract earlier this week.