Storing sports teams with multiple alternative names
Wiki answer from comments on the question:
Yes, this is what I do at the day job with textbook names where different schools will call the same textbook something completely different. Hopefully you won't run into an issue where different team names can overlap, as that makes this sort of problem 10x harder. - matigo
You may want to add a source column and an active to help disambiguate abbreviations since, presumably, a single site won't use the same name for two different teams at the same time even if two different sites use the same name for different teams.

Speaking about storing (subj) I'd add a column for additional attributes. Like &quot;primary&quot;, &quot;official full&quot;, &quot;official short&quot; and so on.. Speaking about scraping script I'd recommend to create normalizing vocabulary, which sets the relation between &quot;any form&quot; of a token and its canonical name (Utd -&gt; United). This may simplify in &quot;some name&quot; converting to canonical name (or in searching for the most close canonical names list). - Akina