Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has challenged his midfielders to up their goal rate ahead of his side's Premier League opener against West Ham on Sunday.

After former Gunners striker Thierry Henry suggested his former club would be favourites to lift the Premier League title if they signed Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema, Wenger has hit back by insisting he already has more than enough goal power in his team.

Olivier Giroud and Danny Welbeck are the only natural strikers in the current Gunners squad, but Wenger has stressed his FA Cup winners are ready to re-write the rule book as they look to confirm they are capable of sustaining a title push this season.

"I respect Thierry Henry's football knowledge, but it is not as simple that you just sign a striker like Benzema and then mathematically you win the title. It doesn't work like that," Wenger told Sunday newspaper reporters.

"It is important to have a top striker, but I think Giroud will not be far from 20 goals. If he played the whole season he would have scored 20 and [Theo] Walcott as well.

"I am not concerned about the goals in our team. We look like we can score goals when we go forward and I think we have to depend less on one guy who can score. We need to develop the collective aspect.

"A guy like [Alex] Oxlade-Chamberlain should have an ambition to score 10 goals. [Alexis] Sanchez can score more goals. I think [Mesut] Ozil has to fix himself a target of at least ten goals every year playing behind the striker.

"We can share the goals around, more so than when Thierry played. Then you knew before the game he would get you a goal, but the dynamic of this team is different and we have many attacking options in this team."

Olivier Giroud scored 14 league goals in 21 games last season for Arsenal. David Price/Arsenal FC/Getty Images

Wenger went on to offer his view on the reason why there is a lack of top quality strikers being produced by European nations, as he suggested a change of culture in the game -- fuelled by a huge injection of cash from investors and lucrative television deals -- has altered the playing conditions for top clubs.

"Maybe we have to create specific schools for centre-forwards," Wenger suggested. "In Europe we produce now plenty of good technical midfielders.

"When I arrived in England, in every single club there was a guy who before the game you'd say, be careful he's good in the air. Be careful because he's aggressive. Every club had one of them.

"Now we are developing less centre-backs and centre-forwards in Europe because before, the team's practiced in the park in bad pitches in winter. You had to lift the ball, had to go behind, and today the pitches are all perfect and in training, with only passing, we develop only midfielders now.

"All the education is about passing on the ground on perfect pitches, and before when you watched training sessions, you had to kick the ball from the back to the front and to go behind and to fight with the centre-back to win the ball and have a chance to retain it.

"That is not the case any more and somewhere, the fact the whole conditions have changed, we have not adapted in our education, we just develop players who are good passers of the ball but not any more tough defenders and not any more players who are used to go into the fight."