As we already know, Haji Wright is doing things with Schalke’s U19s at the moment. After officially joining the club earlier this year once he hit his 18th birthday, the wispy attacker is already putting in goals against some heady competition. And he’s done it alongside a couple Americans, notably former FC Dallas academy midfielder and U.S. U19 Weston McKennie. He’s expected to finalize his Schalke contract once he turns 18 later this month.

Wright was something of an enigma during the latter part of his tenure with the U17 MNT 2013-15 cycle. Wright popped onto a lot of radars – Schalke’s included – thanks to his Golden Boot performance at the 2013 Nike International Friendlies, a tournament that also helped launch Christian Pulisic to Dortmund.

But by the time the 2015 U17 World Cup rolled in, Wright was no longer an automatic starter. He was the first player pulled off the field in the U.S.’s first match of that tournament, and he subsisted on sub minutes for the rest of the event. The book on Wright has always been a plethora of physical tools and a relative lack of technical ones. He’s always been fast and agile and dangerous in space, and he’s also two-footed.

Mark Shanley, one of Wright’s first youth coaches, told me this back in 2015, when Wright first signed with the New York Cosmos.

“He’s got a great change of pace,” Shanley said. “He’s always had a fabulous left foot, even though he’s right-footed. We’d play teams and hear the coaches shouting, ‘Force him right, force him right, he can’t use his right.’ We used to laugh and think that he’s actually right-footed. He just uses his left a lot because it’s so good.”

But could he do the technical, intricate work required of a game-changing professional winger? That question had hardly been resolved by the time his U17 MNT cycle was up. And, in fact, there were perhaps more questions swirling overhead than ever.

Schalke, though, has clearly worked for Wright. After essentially sitting on the first team shelf for eight months with the Cosmos, Wright’s taken off running over the past five months in Germany. It seems as though he’s adding some more technical elements to his game, because you don’t impact games – even at the German U19 level – without a command of every facet of your abilities.

And now we’ve got runaway hype trains.

That article comes by way of Sport Bild, a well-known national soccer publication out of Hamburg. This is the headline.

In English: Will Haji Wright be the next Sane?

As in, Leroy Sane.

The Leroy Sane Schalke just sold on to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City for a potential £46.5 million.

The Leroy Sane who murdered Luka Modric in broad daylight.

Sane is a jittery winger with pace and agility to be sure, but he’s also tremendously assured on possession and is absolutely devastating in one-on-one situations. Catching him is one thing, but pilfering possession off his foot is another entirely. He is, unquestionably, one of the modern crown jewels of Schalke’s academy, a player to which all others will be called to reach. Sane proved in no small measure that Schalke’s system works. It all works.

And now Wright has been elevated to his status as a Massively Huge Prospect To Watch.

Fun.

So we all know about the perilous incendiary devices packed on all of these hype trains that threaten to blow and rocket us all into low-earth orbit. Wright is not Sane and has a tremendous amount of ground to traverse before he can even sniff that level of production. To make matters more difficult, he’ll only have the benefit of famed Schalke U19 coach Norbert Elgert’s tutelage for a full season before he’s age ineligible for the team. At the youth level Elgert coached, among others, Neuer, Özil, Draxler, Höwedes and, yes, Sane.

So we’ll see. But a little bit of positive press in the most competitive youth soccer environment in the world never hurt anyone. Right?