Polo review: Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s documentary has blood, sweat, tears – and bafflingly little Prince Harry

Prince Harry captained the Royal Salute team at the Sentebale charity polo tournament in Wellington, Florida. Photo / Getty Images

Netflix’s US$100 million ($172.4m) deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their Archewell production company hasn’t yielded much of a binge-watch bounty.

There was their carefully curated “tell-all” doc (which didn’t tell all that much) and a rehashed series of interviews with random politicians packaged as Live to Lead.

But now for something completely different – Polo (Netflix), a five-part documentary tracking a season of the American polo championship. It’s got everything: tans, tantrums and toothy blue-bloods toting big sticks.

What it doesn’t have much of is Harry and Meghan, who, in a historic first, manage not to make it all about them. They do finally turn up in the final episode as hosts of the Sentebale charity polo tournament in Wellington, Florida – the Wembley of US polo, if Wembley only let you in if you looked like you’d spent the previous six months soaking up the rays in St Tropez.

Royal watchers will be disappointed by the uncharacteristically camera-shy couple. Harry, captaining the Royal Salute team, banters with his teammate Adolfo Cambiaso. Meghan then arrives to speak fluent Spanish with the Argentine polo pro (which she learned while staying in the affluent Buenos Aires suburb of Palermo Viejo).

With Adolfo as wingman, Harry proceeds to lead Royal Salute to victory and receives the winner’s cup from Meghan. With that, the Duke and Duchess exit, and it’s back to following the polo players in the run-up to the championship.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex at the Royal Salute Polo Challenge in Florida. Photo / Getty Images

The grand final isn’t without drama, as it pits the veteran Adolfo against his son Poroto. The big flaw is that polo is not a particularly appealing spectator sport. Individual players are hard to tell apart under their helmets, and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of strategy – everyone just chases about after the ball, thwacking merrily as they go. If someone invented the polo equivalent of inverted wingers or the high press, they’d clean up.

Polo producer Milos Balac says he wants to demystify the sport and told the New York Post he drew heavily on Harry’s knowledge. “Harry comes at it as an athlete himself who’s grown up in this world and is just a pro – expert, expert, expert.”

Balać also worked on Disney+ hit Welcome to Wrexham, in which Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney pour their Hollywood millions into the ailing Welsh lower league side and guide the team to glory on and off the pitch.

But there’s a big difference between Wrexham’s milieu of a wet Tuesday in Stoke and the lush green fields of Wellington, and it is safe to say Balac and the Sussexes fail in their mission to portray polo as just another sport. There’s lots of blood, sweat, and tears in the series – but not enough of the Sussexes to make this anything other than a dull indulgence about a rich person’s pursuit. This horsey hiccup is another bad neigh day for the Sussexes and their media ambitions.