Samuel Toby Smith is an English forward and, since January 2025, the record signing of Wrexham, which makes him one of the more collectable names in the lower and middle tiers of English football that Walkouts follows. Born in Manchester on 8 March 1998, he came through the Manchester United academy from the age of six and stayed a decade before joining Reading in 2014.
He signed his first professional contract at Reading in 2016 and made his senior debut on 8 August 2017 in a 2-0 EFL Cup win over Gillingham, scoring his first goal a fortnight later against Millwall in the same competition. The years that followed are the shape of a career built on loans: Bishop's Stortford in 2016, Oxford United in 2018-19, Shrewsbury Town in 2019, Cambridge United in 2019-20 and Tranmere Rovers in 2020, then Cheltenham Town in 2021.
Cambridge United signed him permanently in 2021 after that loan, and two seasons there rebuilt his standing enough for Reading to bring him back in 2023. Two productive years followed, and in January 2025 Wrexham paid a reported 2 million pounds for him, making him the most expensive signing in the club's history and beating the previous record by some distance.
For collectors that transfer is the anchor. Wrexham's rise under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds has made the club's shirts a category of their own, and a record signing arriving mid-promotion-push is exactly the kind of specific, dated event that gives a piece its story. He has since become a regular in the EFL Championship, and by early 2026 his senior record stood at more than 260 league appearances and 76 goals across the English divisions.
The collecting field is unusually wide for a player of his profile, because nine clubs across three divisions means nine distinct shirts, most of them from short spells that produced few surviving pieces. A Bishop's Stortford or Tranmere Rovers shirt from a four-month loan is far scarcer than a Wrexham one, and correspondingly harder to verify. Establish the club and the season before anything else.
And establish the person first of all. Sam Smith is a common name, and the most famous person carrying it is a singer with Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards. The footballer is disambiguated on the encyclopaedic record as Sam Smith, footballer, born 1998, and confirmed by Wikidata Q41249297. At Walkouts we read these by club, season and provenance, and the identity is confirmed by date of birth rather than by the name on the item.
