FIFA folded. On Friday, Gianni Infantino pulled the plan to sell roughly a 20 percent stake in a new company running FIFA's events — World Cup included — for $4.2 billion, a deal that valued the whole thing at $20 billion. That's your one sentence of background. Now watch the verbs, because the verbs are doing everything. * BBC: "Fifa scraps controversial World Cup investment plan." CNN: "FIFA scraps controversial $20 billion World Cup investment plan" — same verb, plus a price tag. The Guardian: "Fifa scraps proposal to sell off stakes in World Cup after widespread backlash." Three newsrooms, one verb. And "scraps" is a suspiciously dignified verb. Scrapping is what you do to your own bad idea, on your own schedule, while tidying your own desk. * Here's what the tidy desk actually looked like, per the BBC's own reporting: UEFA's 55 member associations voted to boycott World Cups over the plan. Concacaf's members "rejected" it. The Asian confederation declared "solidarity" with both. Infantino's own senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, resigned, calling it "a bad deal for football" that would "mortgage football's future." FIFA's own chief operating officer said the administration had been "deceived" about the project. Even the UK's new prime minister called Infantino "the wrong man" to run FIFA. That is not a man scrapping a plan. That is a man handing over his sword. * Al Jazeera got closest to typing it. Its headline — "FIFA World Cup fallout: Infantino scraps private investment plan" — at least puts Infantino, not FIFA, in the frame and hangs "fallout" over the whole thing. And its URL just comes out and says it: "fifa-forced-to-scrap-world-cup-private-investment-plan-after-backlash." Forced. The honest verb was in the web address the whole time, like a confession taped under the table. * Infantino's own statement deserves framing: "Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place." That's one 42-word sentence performing the function of two words: "I lost." * And Fox? When UEFA announced the boycott this week, Fox's headline made Europe the aggressor — European soccer's governing body "flips sport upside down" with its boycott of FIFA. Now the man Europe flipped it at has surrendered, and as of Saturday morning Fox's World Cup section leads with the USMNT roster announcement and Infantino promising Iran will "for sure" play in the World Cup. The climb-down itself? Not on the page. When your framing cast FIFA as the victim, the cleanest headline for FIFA's retreat is no headline. * Verbs are scorecards. "Scraps" hands Infantino a dignified exit through a door he's pretending he built. "Forced" tells you there was a scoreboard. The scoreboard read 55-0.