Rob Smith (soccer)
American soccer player

Robert Christopher Smith (born August 20, 1973, in Wilmington, Delaware) is a former U.S. soccer player. He spent five seasons with the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer as a midfielder. He was also a member of the U.S. soccer team at the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Player
Youth
Rob Smith played for Kirkwood Soccer Club in New Castle Delaware for many of his youth years.
Rob Smith played for Thomas McKean High school in Wilmington, DE before attending the University of South Carolina where he played on the men's soccer team from 1991 to 1994. He holds the school's career assists record with 40.
Professional
In 1995, Smith played eleven games with the Delaware Wizards of USISL. The Columbus Crew selected Smith in the second round (20th overall) in the 1996 MLS Supplemental Draft. He spent five seasons with the Crew. Smith announced his retirement from playing on May 5, 2000.[1] He played one game with the Indiana Blast. He then signed with the Charleston Battery on August 2, 2000, for the remainder of the 2000 USL season.[2] He never played a game for the Battery.
“Rob Smith (soccer)” enters the record as american soccer player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Smith, soccer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Rob Smith (soccer)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Smith, soccer and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7340564. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1996, 1991 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rob Smith (soccer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.