After seeing someone asking how you get horses on the LB and how this was never a guide is beyond me but now it is

You want to know, how the leaderboards work?

The leaderboards are determined by 75% from the horse itselves and 25% from the descendents that are still "alive" in the game.

Freshman stallions (age 3) need to have 10 foals bred from them to make it on the leaderboard, 1 of those needs to be bred by live cover. Returning stallions (over age 3) just need to have bred a minimum of 1 live cover foal each game year to keep themselves on the leaderboard. Mares need to have at least 3 foals, no matter if they are still in the game or not to get on the boards.

Stallions LB is deleted every gameyear´s reroll and built up new in the next few days after the studs got used. Mares LB never gets deleted. All horses at the age of 18+ vanish from the boards as they dont have live covers available any more.

Single discipline LBs only look at the traits, that are important for this discipline. So e.g. an WAA stallion can be high on the Dressage LB - but will never show up on the Eventing LBs.

When a horse is created, it gets "points" - but they never show up for us players. They are the basics to determine the rating of a horse. So if a horse has more of these "points" by itselves, it is higher on the boards than one with less "points". And if the foals from this horse have a lot of these "points" they would count up for the LBs, too. This is why some users want to get foals with poor ratings deleted from the game, to push their horse up on the LBs. But if a stud is quite weak and did not make it to the freshman LBs, he would hardly ever manage to get on the LB any more.

These "points" and the LB status are NOT a marker, if the horse is a good producer or not!
To determine a good producer you will have to take a close look at all foals of a horse and the foals´ pedigrees.
Low ratings in a pedigree ( e.g. a visible S rating ) do [b]not[/b] have any influence on the possibilies of a horse as a good-foal-producer, too!

Credit to Kuewi knn stable