It's a sports sport -> subsport -> federation -> country -> league -> club structure for a sporting site.
It's very complex because each sport has different structure (while there around thousand different sports). And I gotta make a CMS for it. My CMS consists of various forms for inserting various types of data, each data type has some info, others not.
(For example, countries can't have email-s and they're being selected from the coutries table. Or sports have subsports, those subsports have parent's, and federations under them contain e-mail insert in the form.)

There's about 10-20 thousand sport clubs, hundreds of leagues, bunch of subsports.
And I think I have it all done in a month (data structure system and CMS), but as we started to insert data, we started to see many exceptions for the system. I.E. Basketball has around 3 layers of leagues, so I gotta rebuild the system to have 1 or more layers of leagues.
It feels like never ending. I constantly have to change it in the same ways, and I don't feel I'm doing it the right way.
Is there a more flexible way to do this?

Examples of sport structures:

Soccer -> No subsports (skip) -> Main federation -> SubFederation -> Countries -> Leagues ->
Aikido -> Countries -> Clubs
Basketball -> Federation -> Area (U.S.) -> League -> Subleague -> Subleague level 2-> Clubs
Clubs
Adventure/extreme category -> Sport -> League (has the same name as the country) -> Club
Oh, btw I'm using PHP/AJAX and MySQL.

if you make your league structure recursive that should get rid most of the problems

eg
table League
ID
Description
ParentLeagueID 'fk that references ID in league table

organising structure likewise

eg
Football
..of course you could be 'cute' and use the country ISO prefix as the ID....

whether you need a separate organisation structutre AND league configuration is I suppose moot

eg
you coudl then flesh out the next layer within the same table
eg

howeever you could come unstuck if your model supports organisations with multiple sports. ferisntance some clubs may have a football and ***** team so you would perhaps have to abstract the organsiation by usiung a foreing key to a club and identify what type of sport the organsiation signed up for


eg
sport types
1 Football
2 ***** League
3 ***** Union
4 Cricket

your organsiation table
SPORTTYPE
ID
ORGANISATION
PARENT ORGANISATION

eg
1 10 FIFA
1 36 UEFA 10
1 44 The Football Association 36
2 132 ICC
2 444 ENGLAND & WALES
2 555 DIVISION 1 444
2 557 LANCASHIRE 555
2 556 DIVISION 2 555
2 32 AUSTRALIA
..

Hi again! Wow it's really nice to see someone make an effort like that. So yea, you got it all right! And it's pretty much the way I did it in the DB. My CMS is the thing we gotta problem with. I constantly gotta keep building new blocks of code for exceptional structures. Just wanted to find a more flexible way to design it.
(But only, to preserve it's type, i put TYPE ENUM ('Sport','Federation','League','Club'')).

Thx for the one club - multiple sports idea.