Italian soccer will keep up its ALS funding drive in Brescia next week when old AC Milan glories like Franco Baresi, Zvonimir Boban and Demetrio Albertini turn out against an ex-Brescia side including Alessandro Altobelli, Evaristo Beccalossi and Roberto Baggio.
The initiative is the second big ALS charity match since Baggio, Ruud Gullit and others rallied to the cause of ex-Milan and Fiorentina striker Stefano Borgonovo in October.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a killer nerve-wasting disease also called Lou Gehrig's Disease, appears to strike former footballers more than the general population.
The April 3 game in Brescia will help fund Borgonovo's foundation, set up in September to find what he hopes might be ''a new penicillin''.
Some of the proceeds from the match will also go to the Italian ALS Association.
The new charity game was unveiled here Monday at a restaurant owned by Milan greats Mauro Tassotti and Roberto Donadoni. The Milan Foundation has already added four million euros to ALS research.
The Italian soccer world was shocked when Borgonovo, 44, revealed he had ALS in September, the second top star to do so after former Genoa skipper Gianluca Signorini who died of the disease six years ago at the age of 42.
An Italian prosecutor, Raffaele Guariniello, is investigating almost 40 deaths of former soccer players from ALS.
Repetitive stress trauma, painkillers or other substances, and even pitch fertilizers have been suggested as possible causes of the discrepancy between rates among ex-soccer players - and not those from any other sport - and the general population.
Former Juventus striker and TV pundit Gianluca Vialli, who is also putting money into ALS research, has been vehement in rejecting the idea that soccer itself should already be blamed for the higher rate of ALS deaths.
ALS is known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's Disease after a star baseball player who became the first top sportsman to die of it, at the age of 37 in 1941.
The story of Lou 'the Iron Horse' Gehrig was made into a 1942 Oscar-winning biopic, The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper.
