[5] He stayed at Lancing College until presumably 1889–90, aged 17 or 18, and in the following year, in 1891, he moved to Paris to continue his education, and as soon as he arrived there, he immediately tried to join a football club.
[11] On 22 October 1899, Wood assisted the White Rovers' opening goal with an "excellent corner kick" to help his side to a 1–1 draw with United Sports Club.
[5] On 26 December 1897, Wood refereed the very first football match played at the Parc des Princes, in which Club Français was defeated 3–1 by the English Ramblers after a 1–1 draw at half-time.
[18] In the following month, on 20 April, he refereed the final of the 1902 USFSA Football Championship between RC Roubaix and RC de France, which ended in a 3–3 draw, but after consulting with Wood, the two captains agreed to keep extending the match by 15 minutes until the tie had been broken; however, the winning goal of Roubaix was only scored in the sixth period of extra-time, in the 175th minute, after nearly three hours of play.
[23] On 16 April 1905, Wood oversaw the final of the USFSA National Championship between Gallia Club and RC Roubaix at the Parc des Princes, which ended in a 1–0 win to the former thanks to a 118th-minute goal from Raymond Jouve.
[28] Later that year, Wood decided to invite to Paris the prestigious Corinthians, a club specializing in European tours and who had the best English amateur footballers, to play a match against a French team.
[29] This match proved to be the catalyst for the revival of the French national team, which had cooled down since the 1900 Olympic Games, since its success pushed Wood to repeat the effort, aided by a handful of patrons who, in early 1904, created the Société d’Encouragement Football Association (SEFA), an external body independent of the USFSA, the then sports governing body in France.
[29] A few weeks later, SEFA secured the financial support of the French newspaper L'Auto thanks to the intervention of one of its journalist, Ernest Weber, and together, they organized two international matches against the English professional club Southampton on 13 and 14 March 1904 at the Parc des Princes; it was then that USFSA's chairman, Robert Guérin, under the risk of giving up control of France's international matches to a parallel organisation, proposed to the Council of the USFSA to form the French national team itself, and therefore, the two French teams that faced Southampton were assembled by the USFSA and by FSAPF, instead of the SEFA, whose selectors included Wood and Weber.
[26][29] In the following month, on 16 April, SEFA assembled a French team to face Corinthians, which was welcomed to Paris by a reception committee that was made up of the most notable figures in French football at the time, including Wood, Weber, Gilon (SEFA), William Sleator (The White Rovers), Walter Hewson (Cook et Cie house), Philip Tomalin, Alfred Tunmer, Georges Duhamel, the Paris Committee of the USFSA, United SC, and the newspapers L'Auto and La Vie au grand air.
[5] During the 1911 United Kingdom census, Wood was again in Devon, then married to an American wife, Evelyn, but the couple was childless and living on "private means".