On going down from university, he joined the Corinthians, then the best-known amateur football club in Britain and one not only renowned for its promotion of the ideals of sportsmanship and fair play, but also fully capable of meeting the best professional teams of the day on equal terms.

In the course of his club career, Smith captained Corinthians in the first Sheriff of London Charity Shield fixture, a competition created to match the best professional and amateur teams in Britain.

"He was," his obituary in The Times contended, "a maker rather than a scorer of goals[10] and football writer Jonathan Wilson described him as "what we would now term a false nine".

[12] The Dictionary of National Biography contends that he "transformed the role of the centre-forward from that of an individual striker into a unifier of the forward line, indeed the whole team."

Though standing nearly 5 feet 11 inches, a good height for the day, he was of slight build, suffered from asthma and lacked the obvious brawn that had characterised predecessors in the England team such as W.N.

Despite the emergence of later, equally capable centre forwards in a more recognisably modern mould – most notably Vivian Woodward, Smith's successor in the England team – his abilities were recalled and praised well into the 1940s.

Wall recalled that Steve Bloomer "had an intense admiration" for his England striking partner, and Bloomer himself remarked that, unlike the majority of amateurs of the day, Smith was invariably courteous to his professional teammates and social inferiors: "He was the finest type of amateur, one who would always shake hands with us professionals in a manner which said plainly he was pleased to meet them.

Smith was also a noted cricketer, representing Oxford University and scoring a match-winning 132 runs in the fourth innings of the 1896 Varsity Match to win the game against Cambridge.