Perth Glory trio Mile Sterjovski, Jacob Burns and Chris Coyne all returned to Australia last year following stints in Europe.
The move was not expected to interfere with their chances of being selected for Australia's World Cup squad and they begin the 2009/10 A-League season with the Perth Glory full of hope and promise but mainly confidence.
Sterjovski had spent almost a decade in Europe, playing with French club Lille, Switzerland's FC Basel, Turkish outfit Hacettepe and England's Derby County before coming home and before his move down under was a Socceroos regular.
Burns spent a similar amount of time away from home, enjoying stints with Leeds United and Barnsley in England, with Wisla Krakow in Poland and Unirea Urziceni in Romania and had been involved in two World Cup qualifiers in late-2008 and mid-2009.
Coyne left home as a teenager in 1996 to join English Premier League club West Ham United where he was loaned out to Brentford and Southend before moving to Scotland to join Dundee. He quickly returned to England, joining Luton Town where he made over 200 appearances and was a then record signing for Colchester United before he made his way to Western Australia. He too had made recent appearances for the national team.
All three players would have been confident that their World Cup chances were strong at the time of signing with the Glory but things have changed dramatically since then and they all find themselves omitted from Pim Verbeek's squad, despite the fact it is just a preliminary squad.
It is hard to pinpoint why the three players were overlooked as before they joined Perth they were all definitely in contention to be included in the final cut for the Socceroos World Cup outfit.
Maybe the fact that Perth is a remote club that doesn't receive as much press as rival A-League organisations such as the Melbourne Victory, Sydney FC or Adelaide United is a major factor.
Perhaps it is purely and simply that they did not have consistent enough form playing in a league that was supposed to be inferior to what they had encountered the seasons prior.
Or was it that they had made the suicidal shift to the A-League - a competition that the national team head coach has criticised in the past.
We all know Verbeek has been less than encouraging in his evaluation of the A-League and the fact he selected just three players (Jason Culina, Craig Moore & Tommy Oar) who had played in the competition in the past six months suggests that the fate of the Glory trio rested in the decision to join Australia's domestic league.
We will probably never know the real reasons but nevertheless, Sterjovski, Burns and Coyne will all be preparing for another season in the national competition rather than representing their nation at the world's biggest sporting event.