He has a pet pig called Peter with its own Instagram account.

He collects sunglasses and taught himself English in six months by sticking labels on household items.

Move over Jose Mourinho, Albion have their own 'Special One' to light up the Premier League.

The £13.5 million club record purchase of madcap Colombian Jose Izquierdo from Brugge could be a snorting deal for the Seagulls.

Especially if the animal-loving winger brings home the bacon by keeping them up.

Izquierdo was not telling porkies when revealing to The Argus his rather unusual pet.

"Yes, my micro pig," he said. "He's the pet of the family. I have him in my house in Colombia. It's something different.

"He's famous, a little famous. He has an Instagram account.

"And I have a bulldog, Lucho. I like animals, they're good company. I bought him and now he's the most important thing in my family. They live better than me!"

Izquierdo faced the full glare of publicity in Belgium, thanks to his exploits on the pitch.

The Argus: He wore sunglasses handed to him by a fan to celebrate one of his 34 goals in 84 league games for Brugge (above).

Izquierdo will be shopping in Brighton to start a new collection of shades.

He said: "I had a lot of sunglasses but now I have to start again because when I come back to my city, all my friends steal them.

"Normally I buy sunglasses in every country I go to. For example, we went to Turkey and I bought sunglasses in the duty-free, in Belgium, in Spain also.

"Each place has sometimes different styles and I buy them. At one time I could have had 20, 30 different pairs.

"But now I have to start again. I have to find some good shops."

Behind the shades, the smiles and the eccentric choice of pet, Izquierdo is deadly serious about his career.

The 25-year-old speedster won the Golden Shoe - as it is known in Belgium - last year, when he scored a Champions League goal against Leicester.

Izquierdo did not wallow in the glory. He taught himself English, efficiently conducting his first press conference as an Albion player at the training complex in Lancing without the need for an interpreter.

"When I came to Bruges I didn't understand anything," he said. "One very good guy at the club (liaison officer), a friend of mine now, helped me a lot.

"We usually had a class once a week in the club but I understood that if I took this class I would not learn fast.

"Sometimes I forgot what I learned after three hours so I started learning alone. I switched my computer to English, my phone to English, all my technology.

"In my house I put labels on everything with the English word,'chair', 'table', 'wall' and I tried to learn different words each day.

"I tried to watch movies in English and I started to joke with my team-mates. Sometimes I wanted to try to say something and they laughed but I started to learn like this. To speak like this took about six months.

"If you are in Colombia you study for four hours but when you leave everything is in Spanish. There, everything was in Dutch but everybody speaks English. It was necessary and humans can adapt to anything."

The Argus: Izquierdo (above) begins the process of adapting to the English game by training with Albion for the first time this week ahead of Saturday's visit to Watford.

They will be monitoring his progress back home in Pereira, the "Coffee Axis" of Colombia in the foothills of the Andes, where he launched his career with the local team Deportivo after starting out as a goalkeeper.

"The dream of everybody is the Premier League," he said. "It's something special. For example, in my country they see a lot of Premier League games.

"It's the top competition, so if you play in this it's not easy to do. You are like a special one."

Like Jose Mourinho? "Yes, but a different character for sure," said Izquierdo with a broad grin.