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West Perth and Subiaco will play in specially designed one-off guernseys when the clubs clash in a Grand Final replay at the International Football Festival on Saturday, April 2.

A crowd of up to 8000 is anticipated at HBF Arena for the event, which has grown to become an annual highlight on the WAFL calendar. Last year, 7800 attended on the day.

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This year will be the first time that both clubs wear unique geurnseys, which have been designed by local school students.

The Falcons Football District in Perth’s northern corridor has the fastest growing migrant and multicultural demographic in the state.

The International Football Festival was introduced in 2011 to embrace this international community and has continued to grow each year as an event.

WA Football Commission Community Development Manager Andrew Ridley said that 67 percent of the Falcons’ district population was defined as multicultural and nearly 40 percent of those people were not born in Australia.

“Many of those are English people brought up with soccer. Kids come across from the UK and from Africa and they are entrenched in their culture of soccer or rugby so we want to introduce them to Australia’s Game, give them a taste for it and then link them up to their local football club,” Ridley said.

“We use schools to expose local children to football and the results have been good over the past three years with school and community football participation rates up more than 20 percent.

“We have encouraging situations at clubs like the Brighton Seahawks and Quinns Bulls, which are both in the English heartland, where now the parents are becoming actively involved as coaches and volunteers and that’s what we want to see.

“We won’t know for another five to 10 years how many colts, reserves or league players our programs produce from the migrant population, but we know this is a long-term commitment.”

The City of Joondalup Citizenship Ceremony will also be held again as part of the International Football Festival, where new Australians will make a public commitment to Australia by accepting the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship.

This will be held in a pre-match ceremony.

International Football Festival

April 2 – HBF Arena, Joondalup

• Free Footy Tickets to local school children (70,000 given away)
• The Falcons to play in a one-off International Round Jumper
• Large Kids Zone with Bouncy Castles, Face Painting, Super Slide, West Coast Eagles inflatable football activities and more
• International Food Stalls
• On-site British Pub / Beer Tent
• Pre-game, half-time, post-game
• A Great Game of Footy – a 2015 WAFL grand final re-match

Photos: West Perth captain Jay van Berlo and Subiaco captain Kyal Horsley in the special guernseys. Photos: Matthew Poon