When Gareth Southgate joined the Football Association (FA) to manage the England under-21 squad in 2013, he joined an organisation facing some serious challenges with how it was perceived by the outside world, and how it operated.

First and foremost, the FA needed to modernise, become more inclusive and, in the process, somehow win back the affections of football fans across the nation who had become steadily disillusioned with the England squad after a run of disappointing performances in major tournaments.

Around the time of Southgate’s appointment, the FA also brought in a new chief executive and technical director, and soon the scene was set for a technology-led culture change to take hold.

“The biggest thing was changing culture,” Southgate told attendees during the first-day keynote at the Google Cloud Next user conference in London. “The FA has historically been viewed as old men with blazers, out of touch with the rest of society. We had national teams that hadn’t performed well, and we knew we needed to modernise.”

One of the first steps in this process involved rolling out Google’s cloud-based online productivity portfolio of products, G Suite, to improve collaboration and communication between the FA’s staff at Wembley Stadium and at its training facility at St George’s Park in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire.

According to Southgate, such new ways of working can take a bit of getting used to for him and many of the other FA coaching staff, who are responsible for training 28 national sides that the organisation is tasked with looking after.

“At times, it’s been uncomfortable,” said Southgate. “Although I’m reasonably technology literate, every time we started a new system and I had a new password and new software to learn how to use, I think for a lot of us as coaches, that can be a difficult space.

“Ours is a game where, generally, when you ask people why they do things, the answers is: ‘Because that’s what we do in football. We’ve always done it that way. Why would we do it differently?’

“It’s a change project and that’s always going to find resistance, and until you start to have some small wins, which at times can take maybe two or three years to achieve, there is always a slight reluctance to really follow the path of the new leaders.”

Those “small wins” have included a new-found level of organisation and consistency in the way the coaching side of the FA works, said Southgate.

“When I took over [as manager of the senior England team in 2016], there were no records of the past from all the England managers there had been over 30 years,” he said. “There weren’t even written reports of what had happened in past tournaments to pass their learnings on. Now everything we do is stored and shared.

“We have 23 players [in a squad], but we have many more staff that work with the team than we have players. Some of them are at Wembley and some are at St George’s, but they can all update these documents and tap into these documents, wherever they are in the world and whatever time of day.

“And the ability to share those things, in particular, has brought huge advancements.”