Last Friday the documentary Unzué. El último equipo de Juancar, a portrait of the day-to-day life of Juan Carlos Unzué, goalkeeper (Osasuna, Sevilla and Barcelona) and Spanish football coach diagnosed in June 2020 with the degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
In this raw, real and hopeful documentary, Unzué set out to do two things: on the one hand, to make the disease, ALS, visible and, on the other, to organise a big event to raise as much money as possible to dedicate to research. This event took place on 24 August 2022, with more than 91,000 people attending the Nou Camp and raising 4,362,872 euros for research into the disease.
In ALS, that great unknown, motor nerve cells (neurons) wear out or die and can no longer send messages to the muscles. Over time, this leads to muscle weakness, spasms and inability to move the arms, legs and body. The condition slowly worsens. When the muscles in the chest area stop working, it becomes difficult or impossible to breathe. Throughout this process and until its end, the patient is fully aware of his or her physical deterioration, which makes him or her suffer doubly from the disease. ALS affects approximately 5 out of every 100,000 people worldwide.
