I'm building a backend that stores match data across multiple sports (football, basketball, tennis, cricket, MMA, etc.). The problem is these sports have fundamentally different structures:

• Football: 2 halves, stoppage time, running score

• Basketball: 4 quarters, fouls that affect scoring

• Tennis: sets, games, points (15/30/40/deuce) — not a running total

• Cricket: innings, wickets, overs

• MMA: rounds, no score until decision

I tried a generic match table with nullable columns for every sport, but it grew to 40+ nullable fields and every query needed sport-specific if checks.

I then tried a table-per-sport approach, but that broke the ability to query across sports uniformly.

My current approach:

1. Shared core table with: match_id, status, started_at, competition_id, season_id

2. Sport-specific payload stored as JSONB column with sport-dependent schema

3. Shared API layer normalizes the response

Question: Is JSONB the right choice here, or should I use separate tables per sport with a common view? What are the tradeoffs for indexing and query performance when the JSONB fields differ per sport?

Stack: PostgreSQL 15, Node.js backend.