There certainly is. If you start with the Olympic world, they have the IOC. They then recognize an international federation as being the worldwide body for a particular sport, which then, in turn, recognizes the national body as being, within that nation, in charge of the sport.
I've done some investigations of international federations that demonstrate the very poor quality of leadership that international federations have on the whole. One of the biggest problems is that there's far too much concentration of power in one or two senior members, usually a president and a maybe an executive director or chief operating officer.
I notice the same impact when I look at some of the national sports organizations in Canada. Of course, that's because they take their whole model from the international sphere, and the international federations take their model from the IOC. In part, it's flawed from the top right down.